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BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES 



OF 

J. HARRIS CHAPPELL, A.M., Ph.D. 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE GRADUATING CLASSES 

OF THE 

GEORGIA NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE 

milledgeville, ga. 
For the Years i 891-1904, inclusive. 



PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE ALUMNAE 

ASSOCIATION OF THE GEORGIA NORMAL 

AND INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE. 



I9°5- 



Atlanta, Ga. 

Thb Franklin Printing and Publishing Company 

Geo. W. Harrison, Manager 

1905 



.lEiRARY of 0ONS8ESS 

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JUN 3 3905 

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J. HARRIS CHAPPELL, A.M., Ph.D. 

1905 



INTRODUCTION. 



The speeches included in this volume are the bac- 
calaureate addresses of President J. Harris Chappell, 
before the graduating classes of the Georgia Normal 
and Industrial College, for the years 1891-1904, in- 
clusive. 

Probably no man has more deeply influenced the 
character of the young womanhood of the State 
than has Dr. Chappell. For thirty-one years a 
teacher, he has touched hundreds of young lives, 
and by his earnest, faithful labors, his sympathetic 
interest, and his high ideal of womanhood, he has 
exerted a mighty power for good. In addition to 
his personal intercourse he has been, through his 
lectures and addresses, a source of inspiration to 
many who have never been brought into intimate 
relation with him, for he possesses the rare and 
beautiful gift of eloquence, and that grace and 
charm of manner that carries his audience with him, 
making it think as he thinks and feels as he feels. 
And the thought and feeling are always noble. He 
has held up before his pupils examples of right liv- 
ing, not in the passionless outlines of maxim or 
precept, but voiced in language so rich, so beautiful, 
so persuasive, that the lessons he has taught have 
sunk deep into the minds and hearts of his hearers 
to ripen into a rich fruitage of aspiration and 
achievement. 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

It seems especially fitting that the task of collect- 
ing these addresses and preserving them in more 
durable shape should be undertaken by those whom 
he so tenderly loved, and for whose encouragement 
they were first spoken. This little volume will be to 
many a cherished possession, recalling the sunny 
days of youth, the dreams of girlhood, old friends, 
and, above all, the beloved teacher who stood to 
them in their college-days as the representative of 
all that was strong, true and of good report. 

May the messages he has delivered of aspiration 
and hope, of earnestness and devotion to duty, be to 
the many who shall read them as they have to those 
who heard them, an incentive to noble endeavor. 

JuivIA A. FlvISCH. 

Georgia Normal and Industrial College, 
February, 1905. 



CONTENTS. 



Address to Class of 1892 — "What Mors 
Could Have Been Done Unto My 
Vineyard That I Have Not Done 
Unto It ?" 7 

Address to Class of 1893 — "What Good 

Thing Can You Show Us?" 17 

Address to Class of 1894 — Music of The 

Spheres 30 

Address to Class of 1895 — Higher Educa- 
tion 46 

Address to Class of 1896 — "Freely Have Ye 

Received, Freely Give" 59 

Address to Class of 189/ — The TpireEEold 

Education ' 69 

Address to Class of 1898 — "DEEP Cauls 

Unto Deep" 85 

Address to Class of 1899 — "A Still Small 

Voice" 102 



6 CONTENTS. 

Address to Class of ipoi — "Sweet Influ- 
ences oe the Pleiades" 115 

Address to Class of 1902 — ■ "Thy Gentle- 
ness Hath Made Me Great" 129 

Address to Class of 1904 — "Haec Memi- 

nisse Olim Juvabit" 139 



NOTE. — In 1900 and again in 1903 the College was closed 
without the usual Commencement exercises on account of the 
prevalence of an infectious disease, hence there was no bacca- 
laureate address in either of those years. 



" U/tyat (T)or<? Qould fteve B<?<?i? Doi?<? tlgto /T\y 
l/i^yard Ji?at 1 ^aue jsfot Dope Ugto It?" 



YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Class : I 
wish to call your attention this morning to a 
certain beautiful passage in the Bible, which 
I read to you several weeks ago at our morning 
exercises. I do not know that you paid any 
particular attention to it then ; I do not know that it 
then made any decided impression upon your minds, 
but I do wish you to pay particular attention to it 
this morning, I do wish it now to make a decided 
impression upon your minds. It is an allegory, ut- 
tered by that grand old prophet and poet Isaiah, in 
the palm-groves of Syria three thousand years ago, 
but I wish you to give it this morning a present and 
a personal interpretation. Here it is: "I will sing 
to my well beloved a song of my well beloved touch- 
ing his vineyard. My well beloved hath a vineyard 
in a very fruitful hill, and he fenced it and gathered 
out the stones thereof, and planted it with th(e 
choicest vine and built a tower in the midst of it, 
and also made a wine-press therein; and he looked 
for it to bring forth grapes and it brought forth wild 
grapes. And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and 
men of Judah, judge I pray you betwixt me and my 
vineyard. What more could have been done unto 
my vineyard that I have not done unto it ? Where- 
fore then, when I looked for it to bring forth grapes, 
brought it forth wild grapes? And now go to, I 
will tell you what I will do to my vineyard : I will 
take away the hedge thereof and it shall be eaten 

(V) 



8 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

up, and break down the wall thereof and it shall be 
trodden down; and I will lay it waste; it shall not 
be pruned nor digged, but there shall come up in it 
briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds 
that they rain no rain upon it." 

Young ladies, less than one year ago, the State of 
Georgia established a vineyard in a very fruitful 
hill, and planted it with the choicest vine and ap- 
pointed the best of vine-dressers to take care of it. 
The whole people of Georgia rejoiced to see the 
planting of that vineyard; rejoiced to see it strike 
root and live instead of dying in the stock, as many 
feared it would do; rejoiced when it put forth first 
the tender bud, then the expanded leaf, and then 
the clusters of inconspicuous blossoms. Men and 
women from all parts of the commonwealth of Geor- 
gia and from other States, men and women of cul- 
ture and distinction, the best people in the land, 
came hundreds of miles, with love in their hearts, 
to see that vineyard; travelers going up and down 
in the land turned aside from their journey to look 
upon that vineyard ; the stranger and the wayfaring 
man paused as they passed by to gaze upon it — and 
each and all, visitors, travelers, strangers, pro- 
nounced upon the vineyard a heartfelt benediction. 
And now, after nine months of strong, vigorous 
growth, in this genial summer season, under the 
ripening influences of grateful showers and these 
silver suns of June, that vineyard offers its first 
fruits to the world. The State of Georgia, the peo- 
ple of Georgia, look for it to bring forth grapes! 
My young friends, shall they be disappointed ? Will 
it bring forth wild grapes ? 

Young ladies, your Alma Mater, the Georgia 
Normal and Industrial College, has been more flat- 
tered, more complimented, more praised, more no- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 9 

ticed, more tenderly cared for, more deeply and 
truly beloved in the first year of its life than any 
other educational institution that ever stood on 
Georgia soil. How truly may the State exclaim: 
"What more could have been done unto my vine- 
yard that I have not done unto it?" And that is 
very well. I do not know that too much care, too 
much love can be bestowed upon an educational in- 
stitution. But I must tell you that I have some- 
times feared for the effect of the excessive praise, or 
rather the premature praise, that has been bestowed 
upon this school. Already everybody says that the 
Georgia Normal and Industrial College is a success. 
Our noble Governor here says that it is a success; 
our State School Commissioner says that it is a suc- 
cess; our Board of Directors and Board of Lady 
Visitors say it is a success; and all the newspapers 
in Georgia say that it is a success; the hundreds of 
visitors from all parts of the State who have passed 
through our classrooms during the session and 
watched you at work say that it is a success ; every- 
body says that it is a success, a great suc- 
cess, a brilliant success, a grand success! And 
yet, young ladies, when I was in Macon a 
few weeks ago, and an acquaintance of mine 
said to me very bluntly and rather ill-manner- 
edly I thought: "Now, Chappell, honor bright, 
is that Girls' Industrial School a success?" I re- 
plied to him : "I do not know whether it is a success 
or not, that remains to be seen." And, young ladies, 
it does remain to be seen. So if any one asks me if 
the Girls' Industrial School is a success, I say to 
him : "Don't ask me; don't ask any one who has rea- 
son to be either partial or prejudiced ; don't ask peo- 
ple who judge from superficial appearances only; 
don't ask people who speak from the lip outward; 



10 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

don't ask people who talk from hearsay; indeed, 
don't ask any one yet, just wait awhile; just wait 
six months or a year until our first class of grad- 
uates has gone into the world, until they shall have 
had time to come in vital contact with Georgia's 
civilization, until they have become part and parcel 
of Georgia's social system, and then go into any 
community where one of our graduates lives, moves 
and has her being, and ask your question there. 
Don't ask it of fools and simpletons; ask it of the 
very best people in the community and of those who 
have had the best opportunities of judging. Ask it 
of the business man who has employed one of our 
graduates as a stenographer or a bookkeeper, ask it 
of the lady whose dress she has made, ask it of the 
first plain countryman or countrywoman whom you 
meet whose little child she has taught. Go into her 
own family circle and ask it of her father, her 
mother, her sisters, her brothers ; ask it of the family 
house-servant and the family cook — ask these peo- 
ple, "Do you think the Georgia Normal and In- 
dustrial College is a success?" 

Last summer just before this school opened, I 
received a letter from a lady whose daughter is now 
a pupil in the school, a member of one of our lower 
classes, and in that letter the lady said : "Since that 
school was first spoken of several years ago I have 
looked forward to sending my daughter to it. She 
is now just old enough to go. I have read your 
prospectus carefully, and I believe it is just the kind 
of school to train a girl into a useful and noble 
womanhood. I send her to you, Mr. President, with 
my heart full of hope for what your institution may 
do for her." Now just wait until we shall have sent 
that daughter home to that mother's heart, and then 
go ask that mother the question, "Is that Girls' In- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 11 

dustrial School a success?" Upon the verdict that 
you get from these sources let the reputation of this 
school be based. By the answers that you get from 
these fountain-heads of truth let the Georgia Nor- 
mal and Industrial College stand or fall. By its 
fruits let this tree be judged. And, young ladies, 
by its fruits it will be judged. 

We send you out as the first fruits of this tree. 
We send you out as the first exemplars of this pro- 
gressive and aggressive experiment in female edu- 
cation. As you go forth into the world you will be 
encompassed by such a cloud of witnesses as never 
before watched with critic's eye the graduates of 
any school in Georgia. Just in proportion as extra- 
ordinary love and extraordinary care have been be- 
stowed upon this school, extraordinary results will 
be expected. You are the servant upon whom ten 
talents have been bestowed, and ten other talents 
will be expected of you in return. God grant that 
you may not disappoint these expectations. God 
grant that on account of no shortcoming, no un- 
faithfulness, no lack of earnestness on your part, the 
State of Georgia shall ever have reason to strike our 
hearts with the bitter cry : "What more could have 
been done unto my vineyard that I have not done 
unto it? Wherefore, then, when I looked for it to 
bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" 
For grapes and not wild grapes are expected of this 
vineyard. Educational wild grapes are not wanted. 
There is a superabundance of them already. Count 
the fashionable female colleges in the land and you 
will get exactly the number of vines that are pro- 
ducing them. The woods are full of them. Some- 
thing better than these are expected of this vineyard, 
and if this vineyard does not produce something 
better the people of Georgia will, sooner or later, 



12 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

pronounce upon it the just but terrible sentence: 
"And now go to; I will tell you what I will do to 
my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof 
and it shall be eaten up, and break down the wall 
thereof, and it shall be trodden down, and I will 
lay it waste; it shall not be pruned or digged; but 
there shall come up in it briers and thorns; and I 
will command the clouds to rain no rain upon it!" 
God grant that such a sentence may never fall. God 
grant that you, by your manners, by your culture, 
by your work, by your character, by your whole 
walk and conduct in life, may illustrate to' the peo- 
ple a better kind of education than has ever before 
been given by any female college in this State or in 
any other State. God grant that as you and each 
successive class of graduates gO' forth from these 
walls to become a part and parcel of Georgia's com- 
plex social system, the commonwealth may feel more 
and more from year to year, through all the nerve- 
centers of her being, the energizing, vitalizing, en- 
nobling influence of this school, so that the people 
shall rise up and call it blessed and the State shall 
say to its founders, "You builded better than you 
knew!" 

So you see, young ladies, that as the first grad- 
uates of this institution a grave responsibility rests 
upon you; but it ought not to be a depressing re- 
sponsibility; on the contrary it ought to be a deep 
and noble inspiration to you. It ought to arouse 
to action all of the best and highest powers of your 
nature ; it ought to make you very earnest girls. And 
I believe to a great extent it will. I believe you will 
go forth from this institution with a far nobler, a 
far more earnest purpose in life than usually char- 
acterizes the graduates of female colleges. Now let 
me beg you, do not, like weaklings, like cowards, 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 13 

basely abandon this noble purpose just as soon as 
you come in contact with the hard, trying actualities 
of life. Do not allow the glitter and glare of world- 
ly vanities to efface from your minds the beautiful 
ideals which we hope this school has impressed upon 
you, so that in a year or two they will fade away 
from the horizon of your being as the crimson blush 
fades from the morning sky. 

You know that your education is not completed 
with your graduation from this institution. Indeed 
it is only fairly begun. All that we can hope for is 
that this school, together with all the schools that 
have gone before us, has laid well the foundation 
upon which you must rear the superstructure. So 
go on striving to educate yourselves, to develop 
yourselves in the direction of the best and noblest 
tendencies of your nature. Strive earnestly and con- 
stantly to develop yourselves into a useful, a cultured 
and a Christian womanhood. I say first into a use- 
ful womanhood! You know the principal object of 
this college is to so educate Georgia girls that they 
will become useful women. That is what differen- 
tiates this college from nearly all other colleges in 
the world. The principal aim of nearly all other 
female colleges is to make women ornamental, and 
all other things are subordinated to that object; but 
the principal aim of this college is to make women 
useful, and all other things are subordinated to that 
object. That is why in this institution girls are 
taught how to teach school, how to write shorthand, 
how to manipulate the typewriter, how to keep books, 
how to make dresses, how to do industrial drawing, 
how to cook, how to make up their own rooms, how 
to wash dishes and set the table, how to be neat and 
orderly and industrious in all things. That is what 
is meant by practical education. All these things 



14 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

tend to make Georgia girls useful, and if they so 
choose, independent women. This is a new idea in 
female college education, and Georgia is one of the 
first States to take hold of it with a strong, vigorous 
hand, and God will bless Georgia for doing it. But 
let us be thankful that in establishing this Girls' 
Industrial School the State of Georgia did not 
truckle to that narrow-minded utilitarianism that is 
so prevalent in the spirit of the age. Not satisfied 
with giving her beloved young daughters a purely 
and exclusively practical education, she goes beyond 
that and gives them something more, gives them 
something if not better at least on a higher plane. 

Referring to the vineyard of which we have been 
speaking, did you observe one peculiar feature about 
it? Did you notice that it says he made a wine- 
press in the vineyard and also "built a tower in the 
midst of it?" Now what does the tower in the vine- 
yard mean ? Well, as far as our use of the metaphor 
is concerned it means the higher education that this 
school undertakes to give. It means all of those 
studies that are pursued in this school for their pure, 
ennobling culture value. It means some part of 
your physics and your chemistry; it means a very 
large part of your Latin ; it means nearly all of your 
English and American poets; it means absolutely 
all of your Shakespeare and your astronomy. These 
are not practical studies, but they are none the less 
valuable because they are not. Their main purpose 
is not to furnish you with the means of making a 
living for yourselves, their purpose is not to make 
your animal life more comfortable, more pleasant, 
more luxurious; their purpose is simply to broaden 
your minds, to refine your hearts, to uplift, edify 
and ennoble the immortal spirit which Almighty 
God has placed in your material bodies. From of 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 15 

old these studies have been the pabulum from which 
the greatest minds of earth have gathered beauty 
and strength and power; and there is not a school- 
girl or a college-girl now in the world to whom 
Almighty God has given brain power enough to as- 
similate any part of these noble studies who will not 
be a better woman, a happier woman, and in the 
broad sense of the word, a more useful woman, for 
having studied them. So, young ladies, in whatever 
environment you may be placed in life, however 
vehemently the apostles of materialism may preach 
to you their narrow, repressing gospel of utilitarian- 
ism, never for one moment, even in your innermost 
hearts, allow yourselves to lose faith in the priceless 
value of these noble culture studies. Never "like 
the base Indian throw away this jewel, the most pre- 
cious pearl of all its fellows." Be thankful that the 
State of Georgia in establishing this great school 
for her beloved young daughters was not content to 
make of them mere workwomen, however proficient, 
however useful, but goes beyond that and tries to 
give them that broad and liberal education which 
will develop them into a cultured womanhood, which 
will make them indeed "like the corner-stones pol- 
ished after the similitude of a temple." Be thankful 
that the State of Georgia in planning this beautiful 
vineyard did not forget to build a tower in the midst 
of it ; and, young ladies, do you not forget to some- 
times leave off "treading the wine-press" to climb 
to the top of that tower, so that your minds may be 
expanded by the sweep of a broader horizon, so 
that your souls may be edified by a clearer view of 
the ever-burning stars of God, so that your lives may 
be attuned to their sublime and rhythmic move- 
ments. 

But, young ladies, in conclusion, let me say to you 



16 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

that higher than the vineyard, higher than the wine- 
press in the vineyard, higher than the tower that 
rises above the vineyard and the wine-press, higher 
than the ever-burning stars that look so serenely 
down upon the tower, there is a transcendent, su- 
preme education towards which you should ever 
strive, that education which will develop you into a 
Christian womanhood! More important than any 
truth your industrial education can give you, more 
important than any truth your practical education 
can give you, more important than any truth your 
culture education can give you, is that oldest, sim- 
plest, sublimest of all truths : God made man in his 
own image and breathed into his nostrils the breath 
of life and man became a living soul, and man's 
whole duty is to love God, to serve him, to worship 
him, and to enjoy him forever! That truth once 
well forgotten, I know of nothing in the world that 
is worth remembering; that truth once thoroughly 
disbelieved in, I know of nothing in the universe 
that is worth the faith of man ! Without that great, 
central, guiding truth human life, even at its very 
best, is at last "a thing of sound and fury, signifying 
nothing." So, my dear young friends, as a very last 
word to you to-day, with all the earnestness that my 
heart can feel or my lips can utter, I would say to 
you: Remember that truth, believe in that truth, 
strive to walk by that truth in every step that you 
shall take in your mysterious journey across this 
earth "from eternity onward towards eternity," until 
the Almighty in his own good time shall reveal this 
mystery to you and what you now "see through a 
glass darkly, you may then see face to face" in an- 
other world where supernal beauty dwells and the 
rainbow never fades ! 



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YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class : I 
have an indistinct recollection of having read 
somewhere, years ago, in some old book, 
possibly it may have been the Bible, but I am not 
sure, a story about a king who was so renowned for 
his wisdom that as he traveled through the country 
throngs of people would gather around him, and 
looking up into his face would cry out eagerly, "Oh, 
mighty king and seer, what good thing can you show 
us ?" My young friends, I believe I realize at this 
moment the feelings of that king as that eager cry 
greeted his ears, for as I look into your bright, ex- 
pectant faces it seems to me I can see written upon 
every lineament of your countenance the importu- 
nate demand, "What good thing can you show us?" 
and I feel as if I would be willing to coin my very 
life's blood into words if I could thereby show you 
something full worthy of this noble occasion, if I 
could thereby give tongue to utterances that would 
fall upon your hearts and souls a golden benediction 
for time and for eternity; but, young ladies, let me 
tell you that during the whole twenty years that I 
have been teaching school, during the whole twenty 
years that I have stood as teacher before boys and 
girls, before youths and maidens, before young men 
and young women, I have never yet been able to 
answer, as I thought it should be answered, that 
eager, importunate cry that ever flows from the 
young human soul, "What good thing can you show 
-us?" Much less am I able to give it an adequate 

2 ba (17) 



18 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

answer on this impressive occasion, when I behold 
you on this sweet June day, at this critical period of 
your life, in your beautiful maidenhood, "standing 
with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet." 
But, young ladies, let me tell you furthermore that 
it is not only kings and seers and teachers that must 
answer that demand, "What good thing can you 
show us?" Every human soul in this world must 
answer it to every other human soul with which it 
comes in contact. Two strangers meet on the high- 
way of life, hand clasps hand, eye looks into eye, 
soul searches soul, and each of the other asks, "Now, 
what good thing can you show me?" Ten thousand 
times every hour in the day that little drama of deep 
significance is enacted in this world of ours. Not a 
new girl entered that dormitory over yonder while 
it was your home this session but from the secret 
heart of every one of you there, there went out the 
silent query, "We wonder what good thing she can 
show us?" what beauty of person, what grace of 
manner, what charm of intellect, what nobility of 
character? Not a new teacher stepped into your 
classrooms this session but he was confronted by a 
hundred bright, watching eyes with the silent, elo- 
quent appeal, "What good thing can you show us ?" 
Not a stranger goes to make his home in any city 
or in any community or any household but from all 
the inhabitants thereof goes out the demand, "What 
good thing can you show us?" And, young ladies, 
as you go out into the world and into life that de- 
mand will be made of you constantly, imperatively, 
importunately. 

You know that old story about the sphynx that 
stood by the roadside and asked a riddle of every 
passer-by; but by whatever route you go out from 
this institution, whether by the north or the east, or 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 19 

the west or the south, by your roadside there stands 
a spirit ten thousand times more importunate than 
the sphynx that will ask of you no riddle, but that 
deep, solemn, serious question: "What good thing 
can you show us?" Into whatever community, into 
whatever neighborhood, into whatever household or 
home you may enter, that spirit is there awaiting 
you, ready to say: "You have been to the Georgia 
Normal and Industrial College, that Georgia Nor- 
mal and Industrial College about which we have 
heard so much, upon which the State of Georgia has 
lavished so much money, and that claims to be in the 
very van and forefront of modern educational prog- 
ress. You bear the sign manual of its approval in 
your hand, now, what good thing can you show us ?" 
Young ladies, whether you will or not, for better 
or for worse, you must answer that demand, and 
there are four ways in which you must answer it. 
First, you must answer it by your handiwork; sec- 
ond, you must answer it by your intellectual culture ; 
third, you must answer it by your character; and 
fourth, you must answer it by your religious faith. 
First, I say, you must answer it by your handiwork. 
What is woman's handiwork? Let us see. On the 
very first page of the Bible we are told that God 
gave man the earth to subdue it and have dominion 
over it, and just a little further on we read that 
"God put man in the garden of Eden to dress it and 
to keep it," and that "God made woman to be a help- 
meet unto man." Subsequently, by mutual agree- 
ment between these partners, man and woman, a 
division of labor was made, and now throughout the 
civilized world it is universally understood that 
man's distinctive share of the work is "to subdue 
the earth and have dominion over it," and woman's 
distinctive share of the work is "to dress the garden 



20 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

and to keep it." That, then, is woman's handiwork, 
to dress and keep the garden in which Almighty 
God has placed her; for every woman who has a 
home or any semblance of a home, however bare and 
meager — nay, though it be but the four walls of her 
own bedchamber — has there a garden to dress and 
to keep. In her own person she has a garden which 
she is bound to dress, and to' keep always perfectly 
sweet and pure and wholesome, and clothed in the 
very best and most becoming garments, and beauti- 
fied with the most appropriate adornments that her 
taste can devise and her means can afford. In her 
own bedroom she has a garden which she is bound 
to keep always exquisitely clean and neat and order- 
ly, and as far as in her lies, bright and sunny and 
cheery. In the parlor, in the dining-room, in the 
kitchen, in the flower-garden, in the nursery, in the 
sick-room, she has a garden, demanding in a thou- 
sand ways her constant care, and the forming, re- 
forming, transforming touch of her woman's handi- 
work. This dressing and keeping of the garden, 
this housekeeping, this home-making, is woman's 
first, most imperative, paramount duty in this world. 
Some of you may know the story of Marie Bash- 
kirtseff, that poor Russian girl, high-born, gifted 
and beautiful, who died a few years ago in Italy, 
literally consumed to death by her burning desire to 
be a great artist, to paint beautiful pictures that 
might make her famous in her own and in coming 
generations; but a nobler ambition than that which 
killed poor Marie Bashkirtseff is that which fills 
the heart of a woman who tries to make her own 
home a picture of perfect beauty and loveliness. 
For every woman that is the noblest of all accom- 
plishments, the very finest of the fine arts. Or, to 
put the whole matter in one short, prosaic sentence, 



baccalaureate addresses. 21 

woman's prime function in human society is do- 
mestic utility; and in this school we have empha- 
sized that function more perhaps than was ever done 
in any Southern educational institution before. 

The very first rule of your dormitory, as appears 
on the printed card, is "Students must rise early, 
dress neatly, and put their rooms in perfect order 
before breakfast ;" that means domestic utility. The 
most popular industrial taught in this institution, 
and the only study taught in the entire college that 
employs two teachers, is dressmaking; that means 
domestic utility. 

No girl is allowed to graduate from this institu- 
tion until she has taken a thorough, full year's course 
in cooking; that means domestic utility. And I 
earnestly trust that, as the years go by, this domestic 
utility feature of our work may be more and more 
emphasized and rendered constantly more and more 
thoroughly practical, so that hereafter, whenever a 
graduate goes out from this institution and the 
people of Georgia demand of her "What good thing 
can you show us ?" she will be able to respond with 
joyous alacrity by her skill in these plain but noble 
household arts ; so that wherever she may go in this 
broad commonwealth "the wilderness and the- soli- 
tary place shall be glad for her, and the desert shall 
rejoice and blossom as the rose;" so- that at the touch 
of her woman's handiwork bare, bald, ugly places 
in Georgia homes may gradually disappear, and "in 
place of the brier shall come up the fir-tree, and in 
place of the thorn shall come up the myrtle-tree." 

It has not been a great many years, young ladies, 
since even in the most highly civilized countries in 
the world this domestic utility was regarded as 
woman's only proper sphere; for her energies of 
mind and heart there was absolutely nothing be- 



22 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

yond domestic utility, or as the hateful Iago, in 
Shakespeare's Othello, sarcastically puts it, all that 
woman was worth in the world was "to nurse young 
fools and chronicle small beer." But, thank heaven, 
that idea, with its stunting tendencies on the female 
mind, has passed away. Modern civilization has 
raised woman to a higher plane than that; modern 
civilization is building woman up on a nobler plan 
than that, and now beyond the narrow confines of 
her domestic utility sweeps the broad horizon of her 
intellectual culture. So when you go out from this 
institution and the people of Georgia call to you, 
"What good thing can you show us?" they will 
expect in reply not only domestic utility, but the 
strong, gentle, pervasive influence of your intel- 
lectual culture. What is intellectual culture? In 
the first place, let me tell you, young ladies, that 
mere knowledge and learning and scholarship, how- 
ever profound, however thorough, however accu- 
rate, do not of themselves constitute culture. I have 
known many, many men and women, who had all 
of that and who were yet very far from being per- 
sons of culture; but the fine, ennobling effect of 
knowledge on mind, heart, character and conduct — 
that is culture. 

A knowledge of Latin or Greek, that is not cul- 
ture, but through the matchless languages of Greece 
and Rome to put yourself in touch with the master 
minds of that olden time, and to feel the thrill of 
their mighty thoughts through all the nerve-centers 
of your being and to have your own language im- 
proved thereby, and your own mind expanded there- 
by, and your own sentiments liberalized thereby, 
that is culture. A knowledge of poetry and litera- 
ture, that is not culture, though you should read and 
study a thousand volumes on the subject, but to 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 23 

attune your own heart-strings to the sweetest and 
noblest music of the poet's lyre, that is culture. To 
look at human life and human nature as pictured 
and ennobled by the profound and myriad-minded 
Shakespeare, and to have your own humanity deep- 
ened and broadened thereby, that is culture. A 
knowledge of the Bible, that is not culture, though 
you should be able to relate every story and tell every 
incident and quote every text from Genesis to Reve- 
lations; but to dwell in spirit with poor, patient 
Job under the palm-trees of Arabia, and to listen 
to him as he pours out his suffering soul in prayers 
and hosannas to the ever-living God, and to feel 
your own heart deeply touched thereby, and your 
own soul uplifted, edified and rendered forever more 
worshipful thereby, that is culture. A knowledge 
of astronomy, that is not culture, but to go out on 
these sweet June nights and stand beneath the blue, 
bending skies and with a seer's loving eye to watch 
the complex movements of the planets and the grand 
procession of constellations in their everlasting 
march athwart the firmament, to hearken to the 
music of the spheres, to listen with rapt attention 
to the songs sung by those silent stars, and to strive 
to harmonize your own life with their perfect rhyth- 
mic movements, that is culture. Knowledge merely 
grasped by the intellect, knowledge merely compre- 
hended by the understanding is not culture, but only 
that knowledge that is assimilated by the immortal 
spirit that dwells in your mortal bodies is true cul- 
ture. Knowledge that ministers to personal vanity 
and personal ambition, knowledge that is made sub- 
servient to any purely personal and selfish end, is 
not culture ; but only that knowledge that helps you 
to understand your right relations to the universe 
around you, that knowledge that is a revelation to 



24 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

you of your humblest as well as your highest duty 
in human life, that knowledge that helps you to 
overcome the downward tendencies of your poor 
human nature, that helps you to keep your soul erect 
and ever aspiring towards its God ; only such knowl- 
edge is true culture. 

So the only knowledge that is true culture for a 
girl is that which beautifies and improves her char- 
acter, that makes her language better, her conversa- 
tion more intelligent, her manners more gentle and 
refined, her heart more loving and charitable, her 
aspirations higher and her whole nature nobler; in 
a word, that knowledge that enters as a vital prin- 
ciple into her daily life, influencing unconsciously 
ly for good her every thought, her every word and 
her every act. Young ladies, if your higher educa- 
tion does not do that for you, your higher education 
is a failure, though you should be able to stand the 
most searching examination that every teacher in 
the State of Georgia could give you. The people 
of Georgia have a right to expect culture like that 
from every graduate of this institution. The peo- 
ple of Georgia have a right to expect that every one 
of you, into whatever community you may go, of 
whatever household you may become a member, 
over whatever home you may preside, shall carry 
with you there the strong, gentle, refining, ennobling, 
pervasive though unobtrusive influence of this high 
and noble culture. But it is needless for me to say 
to you that no college on earth can, of itself, give 
you completely such culture as this. All that the 
best college in the world can do is to prepare the soil 
and sow the seed; it is for you to determine what 
the harvest shall be. All that the best college in the 
world can do is to give you an arc of the circle of 
an higher education; it is for you to bring that arc 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 25 

full circle home ; and to do that will require on your 
part constant, earnest, thoughtful effort at self-im- 
provement. So only can culture have its perfect 
work; so only when the people of Georgia call to 
you, "What good thing can you show us ?" will you 
be able to respond with that mighty factor in the 
upbuilding of a higher civilization, a deeply, thor- 
oughly, nobly cultured womanhood. But, young 
ladies, culture like this presupposes a native nobility 
of character. You can not build up a noble culture 
on an ignoble character. The monster Caliban, in 
Shakespeare's play of the Tempest, is an example 
of an attempt to do so with its resulting failure ; and 
in these days of education and overeducation we 
frequently meet with persons whose moral nature 
is unable to support or sustain the generous culture 
that has been bestowed upon them. Culture is de- 
pendent for its worth upon character, but character 
possesses a value entirely independent of culture and 
infinitely higher than culture, and, young ladies, you 
may be sure that in whatever situation you may 
be placed in life your character will count for more 
than your culture, for more than your talents, for 
more than your accomplishments, for more than 
anything else that enters into the composition of 
your individuality. Nearly every kind of human 
ability is sometimes put in situations where it is so 
"cabined, cribbed, confined" by circumstances, that 
it has no chance to show itself, and goes unrecog- 
nized and unfelt ; but such is not the case with char- 
acter. Character is always recognized, character 
is always felt, character always tells for all that it 
is truly worth. For many years Stonewall Jackson 
was a plodding professor in an obscure college, and 
no one suspected the truth, that he was a man of 
great and original genius, but every student in that 



26 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

college, during all those years, recognized and felt 
the extraordinary purity and nobility of his char- 
acter, just as clearly as it was afterwards realized 
by General Lee and the great Confederate army. 
For thirty years Oliver Cromwell was an obscure 
fanner among the hills of Northern England, and 
no one divined the wonderful resources of his intel- 
lect, but his force of character was felt in that little 
community in which he lived, moved and had his 
being just as powerfully as it was afterwards felt 
by the whole great English nation. 

And so, young ladies, you may be put in situations 
in life where your intellectual superiority, if you 
have any, will not be worth much to you, where 
your talent may avail you little, where your accom- 
plishments will be absolutely useless, but you never 
can be placed in any spot on God's inhabited earth, 
in association with your fellow beings, where what- 
ever purity, whatever force, whatever nobility of 
character you may possess will not be recognized, 
will not be felt, will not tell for all that it is truly 
worth. So, after all, character is the main thing; 
and when you go out into the world and the people 
call to you, "What good thing can you show us?" 
the best and highest that you can show is a thor- 
oughly womanly character; a womanly character 
with its four priceless jewels : modesty, purity, truth 
and love. Modesty, purity, truth and love, the 
emerald, pearl, ruby and diamond of a womanly 
character, polished by the hand of a noble culture 
and set in the gold of an earnest purpose — may such 
be the diadem that shall crown your womanhood! 
But in what light shall these jewels shine? Whence 
comes the light that most glorifies womanly char- 
acter, that most glorifies manly character, that most 
glorifies human life, human nature and everything in 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 27 

this world of ours? Does it not come from above? 
Does it not come from that same heaven whence 
beamed the light at creation's dawn, when the morn- 
ing stars sang together and all the sons of God 
shouted for joy? Does it not come from that same 
heaven whence poured the light that fell upon Moses 
on Sinai, upon the watching shepherds on the plains 
of Judea, upon the Saviour of mankind on the mount 
of transfiguration, and that played like a halo around 
the Virgin's brow? Young ladies, human life never 
has been, human life never can be, glorified and truly 
ennobled by any other light than that. What is the 
finest product of the human soul? I heard that 
query asked in your Normal Reading Circle a few 
weeks ago, but it went unanswered, I believe. Re- 
ligious faith would be my answer to it, for I believe 
more strongly and more deeply than I believe in any 
other thing that has ever been submitted to the con- 
sideration of my mind, that simple, childlike, sub- 
lime belief in God, love of God, worship of God, is 
the very highest thing to which any human being 
ever has attained or ever can attain in this world. 
This religious faith, this belief in something beyond 
this life, better than this life, to which this life stands 
vitally related, is an instinct. It is an instinct planted 
by the hand of nature in the inmost core of our be- 
ing. It is an intuition. It is the deepest, strongest, 
holiest, sublimest of all human intuitions. It is the 
motive of man's noblest living and the source of his 
highest inspirations and aspirations. God grant 
that it may never be displaced in your hearts by that 
horrible nightmare of materialism that is now so 
prevalent in the world; that horrible nightmare of 
materialism with its gospel of dirt that is now being 
preached from the housetops all over the world, and 
that tells you that that old, simple, sublime religion 



28 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

is all a lie; that there is no God, that you have no 
soul, that you came from frog spawn through a 
monkey, and that when you die you must rot like the 
vilest worm that crawls upon the face of the earth 
and that is the end of all and the all of human life. 

God grant that the greatest potential joys of your 
hearts and the noblest powers of your souls may 
never be paralyzed and deadened by this hideous 
doctrine of Atheism. God grant that the old, sim- 
ple, sublime worshipful belief in God, Heaven and 
immortality may ever be the dominating influence 
in your life, for so only can you attain to the highest 
development of your nature; so only can you give 
the noblest of answers when the world calls to you, 
"What good thing can you show us?" In your 
mysterious journey across this earth "from eternity 
onward towards eternity," that demand will be 
made of you at every step, and oh, how much de- 
pends upon how you shall answer it. Your own 
individual prosperity, the happiness of homes and 
households, the peace and joy of communities, the 
purity and righteousness of society, the upbuilding 
of Georgia's civilization, the progress of the human 
race, and the salvation of immortal, souls, all depend, 
in a greater or less degree, upon how you shall an- 
swer that demand ; and then perhaps in future years 
little children, fresh from the hands of God, bone of 
your bone and flesh of your flesh, may gather around 
your knees, and with lovelit eyes and trustful hearts 
may look up into your faces and cry "What good 
thing can you show us?" Oh, then a greater re- 
sponsibility than ever rested upon king or seer or 
teacher will rest upon you to give a right and noble 
answer. God help you to give it. 

And now, young ladies, as a very last word to 
you to-day, if I might do so without any appear- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 29 

ance of sacrilege or profanation, I would fain lay 
my hands upon the head of each one of you with the 
beautiful benediction of the Episcopal prayer-book: 
"Defend, O Lord, this thy child, with thy heavenly 
grace, that she may continue thine forever, and 
daily increase in the Holy Spirit more and more 
until she come to thine everlasting kinsrdom." 



"fllusfc of tl?e Spheres." 



YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Ceass: I 
am very glad that I shall begin my farewell 
words to you this morning while your heart- 
strings are yet vibrating with the music of that 
sweet song which we have just heard and whose 
echoes yet linger in the atmosphere around us. 
There is nothing in the world about which I am 
more ignorant than I am about music, and yet I 
wish to talk to you about music this morning. A 
number of years ago I saw the great violinist, Ole 
Bull, stand before an audience of five thousand 
people and play that simple little air, Lilly Dale, 
and it seemed to me that the doors of heaven had 
been thrown open, and the voices of angels and arch- 
angels seemed to be coming down from the empy- 
rean to breathe divine harmonies through the sway- 
ing body of that white-haired old man as he stood 
there before the footlights with his little instrument 
and his flashing bow. A deathlike stillness such 
as I have never seen equaled in any other large as- 
sembly of men and women pervaded that vast audi- 
ence. The people sat there literally spellbound, and 
every face was lit up with that peculiar spirituelle 
expression that never comes into the human coun- 
tenance except when the deepest and holiest emo- 
tions of the soul are aroused. I once heard the 
great singer, Christine Nilsson, sing "Rock of Ages 
Cleft for me," in a fashionable church at Saratoga 
Springs, N. Y., in the very height of the gay season. 
Perhaps a more worldly-minded, pleasure-seeking, 

(30) 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 31 

money-loving congregation than sat before her was 
never assembled in any temple of the living God, 
but the sweet singer's voice and that grand old hymn 
struck the religious chord away down in those word- 
ly hearts, and every face there fairly glowed with 
spiritual beauty, and strong men bowed their heads 
to conceal their emotion. The renowned scientist — 
Charles Darwin — tells us somewhere in his auto- 
biography that when he was a child and a youth he 
was intensely sensitive to music, but as he grew older 
and devoted his whole mind, heart and soul to the 
study of the material world, that faculty of his na- 
ture that loved music and religion became gradually 
weakened and finally completely atrophied from long 
disuse. He lost his love of music, he lost his belief 
in religion, but he says that every now and then 
when in pursuing some scientific investigation he 
reached a point where the human understanding 
could go no further and he was left standing, as it 
were, upon the very brink of eternity gazing help- 
lessly in the fathomless depths of infinitude, his 
whole being would be thrilled by a profound emo- 
tion precisely like that which certain strains of music 
used to make him feel in his earlier years, and for 
one brief moment his old, simple, child-like belief 
in God, heaven and immortality would come back 
to him. 

So, young ladies, all deep things — all deep 
thought, all deep feeling — is musical : all deep 
thought, all deep feeling is religious. God's uni- 
verse is one grand diapason of music ! That beauti- 
ful fable of the old Greeks about the "music of the 
spheres" is but a figurative expression of this truth. 
God's universe is one grand, sublime diapason of 
music, and man's whole duty is to attune his life 
to that music. That, my young friends, is the text 



32 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

of the farewell words that I wish to speak to you 
this morning. Keep your life attuned to the music 
of the spheres, to the deep and everlasting harmonies 
of God's eternal laws ! 

That human body of yours, that human body of 
flesh and blood, made of the dust of the earth by 
God himself, — what a musical instrument it is ! 
How beautifully, wonderfully, harmoniously made! 
Every fiber of it was wrought by the Almighty, and 
every nerve-chord in it was stretched by his hand 
and attuned by him to the music of the spheres. 
Keep it in tune ! Take care of your bodily health ! 
Commonplace as that injunction may seem, there is 
nothing more important that I can say to you in 
this farewell address. There is no sin that young 
women are more prone to commit, there is no sin 
that you will be more apt to commit than violating 
the laws of physical health. I say sin, because it is 
just as much a sin to violate the laws of health as 
it is to break the commandments, for the laws of 
health are just as much God's laws as the ten com- 
mandments are God's laws. 

Temperance lecturers and moralists are constantly 
railing at men for injuring their health and weaken- 
ing their manhood by dissipation and debauchery, 
but how is it with the women of the generation? 
Only a few weeks ago an association of eminent 
physicians at the North, after a long, painstaking 
and conscientious investigation, published this ter- 
rible fact to the world, that nervous diseases among 
women had increased twentyfold within the last 
forty years, and that this was owing entirely to the 
bad habits of living among women of these days. 
Young ladies, as graduates of this college you are 
bound to give serious thought to this subject. The 
greatest value of all education is to make people 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 33 

thoughtful about the practical conduct of life, and 
if the general education and culture you have re- 
ceived at this College does not make you thoughtful 
about this matter, then either this is a mighty sorry 
sort of school, or else you are a mighty sorry sort of 
a girl. Besides the indirect effect of the general 
education and culture you have received here, you 
know that we have in several very direct ways tried 
to impress this matter strongly upon your minds. Our 
school of cooking, our school of physical culture, the 
instructions and suggestions that we have given you, 
and the appeals that we have made to you in regard 
to dress reform are all direct practical lessons in the 
art of preserving health. Take these lessons home 
with you, improve upon them by your own thought- 
fulness, carry them out in your own practical life, 
and, as far as you can without officiousness, dissemi- 
nate them among the girls and women with whom 
you associate. So will you do a great and lasting 
good for the State of Georgia. As graduates of this 
institution you are bound to do this reform work. 

If every girl who leaves this College should carry 
away with her from this school absolutely nothing 
but the ideas of dress reform that we have tried so 
hard to impress upon your mind and inculcate into 
your habits, and should persuade others to adopt 
them, that alone would do enough good to repay 
the State of Georgia ten times over for all the money 
that it has ever expended on this institution. Not 
long ago a little girl, who had been to the World's 
Fair in Chicago, said to me : "Mr. Chappell, on the 
Midway Plaisance I saw an African woman with 
her face all scarred up with ugly scratches running 
up and down and across her face. She did it herself 
when she was a girl and she thought it was pretty. 
Mr. Chappell, don't you think she was a fool?" 

3ba 



34 BACCAIvAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

But, young ladies, let me say to you this morning, 
that the civilized American woman that pinches and 
cramps and deforms her waist in that damnable 
abomination of modern dress called a corset is a 
thousand times bigger fool than the African woman 
that scarifies her face. For the civilized American 
woman by this miserable corset not only utterly 
destroys the beauty and symmetry of her figure and 
makes it a thing ugly to look upon, but she vitally 
injures the most important organs in her body. And 
the worst of it is she knows perfectly well that this 
is true, and yet at the behests of a depraved fashion 
she continues the sinful practice. I mention this 
only as one instance of how health is injured and 
untold suffering is brought into' the world and trans- 
mitted from generation to generation by the con- 
summate folly of women in fashionable life. My 
dear young friends, I earnestly trust that you will 
never commit these follies, that you will never be 
guilty of these sins. Remember that bad health, a 
weakened organ, a diseased function, not only makes 
you uncomfortable, not only makes you miserable, 
but in a great measure unfits you for doing rightly 
the work that the Almighty sent you into the world 
to' do. Remember that the sins of mothers are 
visited upon the children unto the third and fourth 
and tenth and twentieth generation of them that 
break God's laws of health. Remember that every 
weakened organ, every diseased function, every mor- 
bid tendency, every unstrung nerve in a woman's 
body makes a false note in the harmony of the 
universe, a false note that does not end with her 
existence, but goes on down the ages a jarring dis- 
cord, like sweet bells all jangled, harsh and out of 
tune. No more important duty, no more impera- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. OO 

tive obligation can rest upon you in this human life 
than to take care of your bodily health. 

Undoubtedly the strongest and highest reason 
why you should take care of your bodily health is 
because upon that depends in great measure the 
healthful action of your mind. The finest part of 
the human body is the brain, that exquisite organ 
upon which mind plays the various tunes of thought. 
Brain is the instrument, mind is the musician, edu- 
cation is the musician's training, and thought is the 
music. As graduates of this college you are sup- 
posed to have what is called "a higher education," 
but are your thoughts really high and classic and 
noble? If not, your higher education is a failure. 
And will your life keep time and tune to high and 
noble thoughts, to the music of the spheres? If not, 
your higher education is a failure. 

There are two distinct kinds of education, practi- 
cal education and higher education. Some superfine 
sentimentalists try to make us believe that there is 
really no difference between the two ; that they merge 
into each other, and all that sort of nonsense, but 
that is not true. The difference between practical 
education and higher education is just as clearly 
marked as the line where the blue sky comes down 
to the green earth. Let me illustrate the difference. 
When I was in Boston on my educational pilgrimage 
a little over a year ago I went one morning to the 
Boston Cooking School, the oldest and most famous 
institution of this sort in America, and I sat there 
for three mortal hours, and saw the teacher teach a 
class of young women how to make pie-crust ; merely 
that and nothing more, how to make pie-crust. It 
was an absolutely perfect lesson; it was one of the 
most successful exercises I have ever seen in any 
schoolroom. It was not edifying, it was not up- 



36 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

lifting, it did not fill the immortal soul with tran- 
scendental thoughts and all that sort of thing, be- 
cause there is nothing edifying or uplifting or 
transcendental about pie-crust. Nevertheless it was 
exceedingly interesting, and it filled me with ad- 
miration, and to my dying day I shall never forget 
that superb lesson on how to make pie-crust. It 
was a splendid illustration of that cant phrase that 
you hear used so frequently in educational circles 
in these days about "putting the brain into the 
hands," for that teacher made those young women 
put their brains into their hands before she allowed 
them to put their hands into that pie-crust dough. 
In other words it was a splendid illustration of 
practical education. The very next morning after, 
my visit to this cooking school I went to the famous 
Emerson School of Oratory and saw the principal 
of the school give his senior class a special exercise. 
The lesson of the day was the exposition and rendi- 
tion of that matchless gem of Shakespeare's incom- 
parable genius, the third act of Othello, the same 
that you heard so beautifuly read from this plat- 
form a few weeks ago. It was a glorious lesson! 
There was nothing practical about it, there was 
nothing utilitarian about it, it did not undertake 
"to put the brain into the hand" as that pie-crust 
lesson did ; nevertheless it was a glorious lesson ; it 
delighted the intellect, it touched the heart, it thrill- 
ed the soul, it vivified the imagination, it edified and 
uplifted the spirit of every pupil and every visitor 
present. In other words it was a splendid illustra- 
tion of what is called higher education. Now, 
young ladies, in every human mind there is a Shakes- 
peare side as well as a pie-crust side, and in every 
right education each of these sides should have a 
due share of attention, instruction, training and dis- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 37 

cipline; and that is what we are trying so hard to 
give in this school. We sweep the whole gamut of 
education from pie-crust to^ Shakespeare, and we are 
constantly endeavoring to preserve a just balance 
between pie-crust and Shakespeare. The practical 
side of education is very much emphasized in these 
days. I sometimes fear that it is too much empha- 
sized, and that we are in danger of forgetting the 
inestimable value of higher education. 

Never in the history of this country was there 
such crying need as now for the uplifting and purify- 
ing power of a truly high and noble education. For 
with all our boasted progress the terrible fact stares 
us in the face that the tendency of American civili- 
zation to-day is towards a lower standard of morals 
and a lower ideal of life than was ever known be- 
fore in this country. Men are fast losing their be- 
lief in religion, men are fast losing their faith in 
God, their belief in all truly noble and exalted senti- 
ment and are fast coming to' believe in absolutely 
nothing but the almighty dollar and what the al- 
mighty dollar can buy. 

Good men and good women all through this coun- 
try are earnestly hoping and earnestly praying that 
the rising generation of young men and young wo- 
men will check this baleful tendency, but not much 
can be expected from the young men, for in most 
cases as soon as a young man comes down from the 
Sinai of college or university he throws away the 
higher law he is supposed to have received there, and 
joins the rabble in the base worship of the golden 
calf. It is therefore to the young women, to the 
educated, cultured young women of the rising gen- 
eration, that we must chiefly look to bring about 
regeneration and reform, not by making speeches, 
not by delivering lectures, not by running over the 



38 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

country shrieking for the ballot, not by writing ar- 
ticles for the newspapers, not by voting, but by puri- 
fying the spring at its very source, in the school- 
room, in the family, in the home. The woman's 
moral influence in the family is ten times greater 
than the man's. The family gets its intellectual 
tone much more from the women of the household 
than from the men, much more from wife, mother, 
sister than from husband, father, brother. Upon 
women much more than upon men falls the duty of 
dealing with mind, heart and character, while these 
are yet in the formative state — wax to receive and 
marble to retain impressions. The more thoroughly 
educated, the more highly cultured a woman is, the 
better she is fitted for discharging this most respon- 
sible duty in human life; and one of the most im- 
portant missions that lies before the Georgia Nor- 
mal and Industrial College is to supply Georgia 
schools, Georgia families with just such educated, 
cultured women. So go forth, my friends, into 
this field where the harvest is indeed plenteous, but 
the laborers are few. Go forth, and in Georgia 
schoolrooms, Georgia families, Georgia homes, let 
the light of your higher education so shine that men 
may see your good works and glorify your Father 
which is in heaven. 

But, young ladies, as strongly as I believe in the 
intellectual culture of women, as strongly as I be- 
lieve in brain power, let me say to you that in every 
true woman there is a power greater than brain 
power. In every true woman, feeling counts for 
more than thought. In every true woman's uni- 
verse, beyond the horizon of the intellect sweeps the 
horizon of the emotions. In every true woman's 
life, sweeter far than the music of the mind is the 
music of the heart. Show me the woman of whom 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 39 

this is not true, and I will show you one who is 
either a very ill-fashioned sort of a woman, or else 
one in whom the womanly nature has been warped 
and perverted. When I was a boy I came across 
this verse from the Koran, or Mohammedan Bible, 

"He was the angel, Israfael, 
And his heart-strings were a lute." 

And I thought it was a beautiful passage, but I 
thought it would have been much more appropriate 
if it had been, 

"She was the angel, Israfael, 
And her heart-strings were a lute." 

A number of years afterwards, I happened to be 
wandering one day in an old colonial graveyard in 
a certain city at the North, and I came across a gran- 
ite shaft erected by some bereaved husband to the 
memory of his dead wife, and on it was engraved 
as an epitaph that very verse from the Koran with 
precisely the change that I had fancied, 

"She was the angel, Israfael, 
And her heart-strings were a lute." 

The friend that was with me thought it was ab- 
surd, and I admit it was somewhat ridiculous, the 
man's taking the liberty of changing the sex of the 
angel, nevertheless I thought it was just the most 
beautiful epitaph that I had ever seen upon a wo- 
man's grave. What sweeter tribute could any wo- 
man ask of the loved ones that she leaves behind her 
when she takes her flight to the spirit land, than they 
should always think of her in that way, 



40 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

"She was the angel, Israfael, 
And her heart-strings were a lute." 

Just the most precious thing that ever falls to the 
lot of any man in this world is a woman's love ; from 
the time when she sings his cradle-song to the day 
when she wipes the death-sweat from his brow, just 
the most powerful influence for good that can ever 
come into a man's life is a woman's love! And, 
young ladies, however brilliant and cultured an in- 
tellect you may possess, and however energetically 
you may use that intellect for the betterment of 
human kind, you may be sure that the best influence 
that you will ever exert in this world over men, over 
women, over society in general, must come more 
from the heart than from the head. 

A few weeks ago' in your Normal Reading Circle 
I heard one of you quote a fine passage from Emer- 
son, like this, "A beautiful face is a good thing, a 
beautiful form is better than a beautiful face, but a 
beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form — 
it is the finest of the fine arts." This beautiful be- 
havior, of which Emerson speaks, comes directly 
from the heart. When that poor African woman in 
the jungles of New Guinea found the English trav- 
eler, Mungo Park, lying under a tree burning with 
fever and half dead, and with the aid of her daugh- 
ters took him up and carried him to her hut and 
nursed him back to life and health, that was beau- 
tiful behavior; it came directly from the heart. 
When Chevalier Bayard, lying wounded upon the 
battlefield, put the cup of cold water from his own 
famished lips and gave it to a dying soldier by his 
side, that was beautiful behavior; it came directly 
from the heart ! When the most perfect gentleman 
that this world ever saw, he whom man call Savior, 



BACCAIvAUREATE addresses. 41 

said to the rebuking disciples, "Suffer little children 
to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such 
is the kingdom of heaven," and took them in his 
arms and blessed them, that was beautiful behavior ; 
it came directly from the heart ; and so all beautiful 
behavior comes directly from the heart; it is the 
spontaneous outpouring of the milk of human kind- 
ness. Intellect has little to do with it, education still 
less. Indeed we find the finest instances of it among 
simple, unsophisticated people. See how gloriously 
it shines forth in some of Shakespeare's humblest 
characters : in Adam in As You Like It ; in the 
Fool in King Lear; in the nurse in Romeo and 
Juliet, for instance. Some of the most touching 
and pathetic instances of it that I have ever seen in 
my life occurred among the negro slaves in ante- 
bellum days in the South. But, young ladies, I heard 
not long ago the story of the beautiful behavior of a 
certain poor Georgia girl which I wish to tell you 
this morning, for it would be well for every Georgia 
girl to emulate her noble spirit. This girl lived away 
up there in Northwest Georgia among the foothills 
of the Blue Ridge mountains. Her father was an 
old Confederate soldier, and he had a little farm 
there among the mountains. One year soon after 
he had planted his crop he was stricken down with 
inflammatory rheumatism and was bedridden for 
the rest of the year. There was no man, no boy, to 
take his place upon the farm, so his daughter, this 
seventeen-year-old Georgia girl, who had never done 
anything but a woman's work around the house, took 
the plough-handles in her own precious hands and in 
sunshine and storm, through heat and cold, from 
daylight to dark, she toiled like a bond-slave in the 
field. A loving God blessed the labor of her hands 
and the conscious earth laughed an abundant harvest 



42 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

into her lap. From the profit of her crop she not 
only provided her invalid father with comforts, but 
by rigid economy managed to save enough to pay 
her expenses the next year at a good school in a 
neighboring town. When commencement time came 
she had won a high honor, and was appointed one of 
the readers of the occasion. From every valley, glen, 
cove, gorge in that mountain country the good people 
poured forth to that commencement. There was 
such an enormous crowd that they could not get 
into the schoolhouse, so the exercises were held un- 
der a bush-arbor out of doors ; and when that girl 
arose to read her essay she was received with such a 
cheer, with such a shout, with such a yell, as no cam- 
paign politician running over the country begging 
for votes ever heard from the throats of those moun- 
taineers ; with such a cheer, with such a shout as no 
female lecturer running over the country trying to 
reform people ever heard, or ever deserved to hear, 
from any crowd; for let cynics say what they will 
the world does know its true heroes. The next year 
that girl taught school; more children came to her 
than could be crowded into the schoolhouse. From 
her earnings she not only administered to the last 
days of her dying father, but in a great measure fed, 
clothed and educated her younger brothers and sis- 
ters. 

Young ladies, we of the South are constantly beg- 
ging rich men from the North to come down here 
with their money to develop the natural resources of 
our country and to build up our towns and cities with 
mills and factories ; and that is very well ; God 
knows poor, poverty-stricken Georgia needs help of 
that kind badly enough ; but let me tell you one 
thing, one native Georgia girl like that is worth 
more to the State than a million dollars of Yankee 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 43 

money! One noble woman's life like that, with its 
boundless influence for good, is worth more to the 
true civilization of the commonwealth than a hun- 
dred cotton factories with a million buzzing spin- 
dles! I point this mountain girl as an example to 
you not because you will be expected to repeat her 
deeds ; possibly you may never be called upon even 
to do deeds like hers ; but in whatever position you 
may be placed, by whatever circumstances you may 
be surrounded, however and wherever your lines of 
life may fall, you can emulate her unselfish, loving, 
energetic, earnest, noble, aspiring spirit. And the 
very reason that I maintain so stoutly that this Geor- 
gia Normal and Industrial College is the greatest 
educational institution that ever stood on Georgia 
soil, is because so many girls do- come here in exactly 
that spirit, because so many girls do come here under 
circumstances so similar to those that first darkened 
but afterwards glorified the life of that mountain 
girl! With the deepest heart-felt pride I point our 
visitors this morning to this assembly, and I say to 
them, "These are Georgia girls ; there are three hun- 
dred of them ; they come from one hundred differ- 
ent counties in Georgia; they do not come from 
homes of wealth and pomp and material grandeur; 
nay, many of them come from homes of poverty; 
many of them have paid every cent of their expenses 
here this year with money earned by themselves as 
teachers in the country schools or by other means; 
many others have been sent here by poor widowed 
mothers, or older brothers and sisters, who have to 
toil hard for their daily bread, and who out of their 
scanty earnings manage by heroic self-denial to save 
enough to give their loved ones the advantages of 
this school ! These girls do not come with the rustle 
of silken skirts or flash of diamonds or other shows 



44 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

of wealth, but they come with a noble spirit and with 
hearts of gold ! They do not come here to be pre- 
pared to adorn society or to talk nonsense to spider- 
leg dudes at carnivals of folly, but they come to fit 
themselves for a woman's noble duties wherever 
their lines of life may fall. Travel the world over, 
and in no school or college or university can you find 
a nobler student-body than these three hundred 
Georgia girls ! O Georgia men and Georgia wo- 
men, from whatever section of the State you may 
come, if you can look upon this assembly and know 
its true story without a thrill of pride, without a tear 
of j°y> y° u are no true Georgian! O Georgia 
legislator, that goes up yonder to Atlanta to take 
care of the commonwealth, if you can know the facts 
about this assembly and yet with niggardly mean- 
ness refuse to cherish and to foster this institution, 
stint the bread of life to these Georgia girls, you are 
unworthy of the State that has honored you, un- 
worthy of the mother who bore you. 

"Living you shall forfeit fair renown, 
And doubly dying shall go down 
To the vile earth from which you sprung, 
Unwept, unhonored and unsung." 

Young ladies, it is a great privilege and a great 
responsibility to go out into the world a graduated 
representative of such a student-body. An important 
epoch in your life closes this morning, and you step 
across the border-line into a world of new expe- 
riences. You came to us some of you two years ago, 
some of you three years ago. With a father's part- 
ing blessing yet fresh upon your head, with your 
cheek still wet with a mother's farewell tears, with 
mind bewildered by a strange, new world, and heart- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 45 

sick for home, you sat here on that first morning! 
The intervening days and months and years you have 
spent most worthily in diligent, earnest pursuit of 
the noble purpose that brought you here. Every 
teacher in the faculty will join with me in testifying 
to that. And now we send you back to father, moth- 
er, home; we earnestly trust that you will carry 
with you from this school some things that will be 
good for you and for others for time and for eter- 
nity. And now you sit here for the last time, the 
lights and shadows of your college-life all behind 
you, your eyes bedewed with tears of sadness, your 
heart throbbing with mingled feelings of grief and 
joy. "Oh, death in life, the days that are no more!" 
I hope you will carry with you always some sweet 
and precious memories of the days you have spent 
with us, some sweet and precious memories of the 
halls and classrooms of this building, of your teach- 
ers, of your schoolmates, of your life at the dormi- 
tory and in the private boarding-houses, of the good 
people and red hills and elm-shaded streets of dear 
old Milledgeville ! May the blessings of the Al- 
mighty rest upon you, and when your immortal soul 
shall have taken its flight back to the God that gave 
it, may those who have known you best be able to 
say of you that "her life was an anthem to the ever- 
living God," in all her walk and conduct she kept 
time and tune to the music of the spheres ! 



^i§J?<?r Education 



'OUNG Ladies of the Graduating Ceass: 
For several years past you have been diligently 
and earnestly engaged in getting what is com- 
monly called an higher education. It has been 
a long and laborious task, but to you, I believe, not 
an unpleasant one. This morning you are supposed 
to bring that task to a well-rounded completion; 
you are now supposed to have an higher education. 
And what is an higher education? When a young 
man goes to a medical college, or a law school, or 
a school of technology, he has a perfectly clear, 
definite idea of the real meaning of that education, 
and of its aim, its purpose and its value; but have 
you a perfectly clear, definite idea of the real mean- 
ing of an higher education, such as you are supposed 
to have gotten at this college, and of its aim, its pur- 
pose and its value? What is the real meaning of an 
higher education ? 

Let me give you my idea of it by a very simple 
illustration : Many years ago, in looking through an 
old library, I chanced to come across a volume of 
essays by William Hazlitt, a very gifted and bril- 
liant writer, who flourished in England about sev- 
enty-five years ago, In one of these essays Hazlitt 
relates a personal experience like this : Hazlitt's 
father was a Unitarian preacher. He lived out in 
the country, and he was himself a man of great cul- 
ture and scholarship, and right frequently distin- 
guished men and scholars used to come from Lon- 
don and other places to spend the night, or a day or 

(46) 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 47 

two, at his hospitable country home. On these occa- 
sions, as the company gathered around the family 
hearthstone at night for the purpose of talking, 
young Hazlitt, who was then a youth seventeen 
or eighteen years of age, used to sit in a corner by 
himself listening silently and delightedly to the con- 
versation of these distinguished men; but one day 
a slab-sided, awkward-moving man, with a big, 
beautifully shaped, classic head set upon his rounded 
shoulders, came to this Hazlitt home. 

It was the poet Coleridge, undoubtedly one of the 
most gifted brilliant intellects ever born into the 
world, and especially noted for the almost preter- 
natural splendor of his conversational powers. As 
the elder Hazlitt and Coleridge sat before the fire 
that night conversing, young Hazlitt sitting silently 
in his corner recognized in Coleridge's conversation 
something finer, something superior to anything he 
had ever heard from mortal lips, and he listened en- 
tranced and infatuated. That night, just as they 
were going to bed, old man Hazlitt said, "Son, to- 
morrow morning you will have to walk to the sta- 
tion with Mr. Coleridge to carry his luggage for 
him." Nearly all night long that boy lay awake 
anticipating with delight the walk with Coleridge 
next morning. Morning came. "It was a bright, 
beautiful, perfect spring day," says Hazlitt. "The 
station was four miles distant; all the way there 
Coleridge talked incessantly and I listened raptur- 
ously. He talked of nothing except the things im- 
mediately around us, of the trees and the grass and 
the flowers and the birds and the white cumulus 
clouds floating across the deep blue sky; but, oh, 
what glorious talk it was! What luminous power 
it had ! It seemed to send a light away down into 
the deepest depths of my mind. It floated the uni- 



48 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

verse for me in an atmosphere of thought and of 
poetry. As I trod that same road on my way back 
from the station, the world seemed transformed to 
me, and trees and grass and flowers and floating 
clouds and the blue sky had acquired for me a higher 
beauty and a deeper meaning. That walk with Cole- 
ridge was the great intellectual quickening of my 
life ; but for that walk with Coleridge, I should never 
have persisted in the study of metaphysics and the 
higher literature ; but for that walk with Coleridge, 
I believe, I should never have written a line for pub- 
lication." 

Young ladies, that was higher education. The 
effect that Coleridge's talk had upon that boy's mind 
was higher education; and if some such effect has 
not been produced upon your mind during your 
four-miles walk, or your three-miles walk, or your 
two-miles walk, taking the years for miles, that you 
have had with the teachers of this Faculty, then you 
have received from this institution no higher educa- 
tion. If by reason of your sojourn at this college, 
God's universe has not acquired for you a higher 
beauty, God's eternal laws a deeper and a grander 
meaning; if during your sojourn at this college your 
mind has not been illuminated in its deepest depths ; 
if the higher powers of your intellect have not been 
quickened into a life that will last; if the activities 
of your nature have not been aroused to put forth 
your utmost efforts to develop yourselves in the di- 
rection of the best and highest tendencies of your 
nature, then however much learning and scholarship 
you may have acquired, however perfect your reci- 
tations and your examinations and your reports 
may have been, you have received from this college 
no higher education ! 

Higher education is the assimilation by mind, 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 49 

heart and soul of those perennial truths of God that 
edify and inspire the immortal spirit that dwells in 
man's mortal body. There are many different kinds 
and sorts and degrees and uses and functions of 
education, but only that education whose principal 
purpose is to edify and inspire the soul of man is, 
properly speaking, higher education, and it is this 
particular phase of education that I have chosen to 
dwell upon in this my last talk to you. 

Far be it from me to undervalue that practical, 
utilitarian education that serves to guide us aright 
along the pathway of the ordinary, every-day duties 
of life. 

Over in that cooking-school yonder you got a 
receipt how to make biscuit. If you learned that 
receipt well and thoroughly both theoretically and 
practically, you have had from this institution no 
more important, no more precious lesson. There 
is no department or branch of this college that I 
value more highly than I do our cooking and our 
dressmaking school; and I should be delighted if 
we could teach well and thoroughly more of these 
home-making studies in our college, for after all is 
said and done, they are just the most important part 
of a woman's education, and I have little respect for 
any woman who despises or who disparages them, 
or who fails to make herself proficient in them, and 
from the bottom of my heart I am sorry for the poor 
woman who never has any need for them, for the 
poor woman who in all her life has no call to use 
them. But it is needless for me to dwell upon the 
importance that the founders and trustees of this 
college attach to these home-making studies, and 
to those other industrial or bread-winning studies, 
such as your teacher-training, your stenography 
and typewriting, your dressmaking and such like. 

4ba 



50 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

A thorough teaching of such things as these con- 
stitutes as everybody knows the characteristic fea- 
tures of this college. This stone which the educa- 
tional builders of former days rejected has become 
the chief corner-stone of the Georgia Normal and 
Industrial College. 

Neither do I mean to disparage that enlighten- 
ing education whose purpose is to impart general 
information, worldly knowledge, worldly wisdom, 
by which the student is brought into sympathy 
with the progress of the times and put in touch with 
the spirit of the age. This is an exceedingly im- 
portant kind or phase of education, and, as you well 
know, the aim of a large proportion of the studies 
that you have pursued in this college has been to 
give you that kind of education. 

But what I wish to do especially this morning is 
to impress upon your minds this truth : That after 
all practical, utilitarian knowledge is acquired, after 
all wordly wisdom and social accomplishments are 
acquired, after all of that superficial intellectual 
polish that the world calls culture is acquired, there 
is still something beyond, and that something be- 
yond is the true higher education, or the assimila- 
tion by mind, heart and soul of those perennial 
truths that edify and inspire the immortal spirit of 
man. By edify, I mean that gives you a grand and 
lofty conception of God's universe of matter and 
universe of mind. By inspire, I mean that stirs the 
divinity that dwells within you, that gives you a 
high ideal of human life, and moves you to put 
forth your utmost efforts to develop yourself in the 
direction of the noblest tendencies of your nature. 

Broadly speaking, the higher education is de- 
rived from three principal sources, namely, from 
the assimilation of scientific truth, from the assimi- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 51 

lation of literary truth, from the assimilation of re- 
ligious truth. I wish to say a few words to> you in 
regard to each of these ; and first, as to the assimila- 
tion of scientific truth. 

Young ladies, the educational value of any scien- 
tific truth is enhanced an hundredfold when it is 
gotten directly from God's inspired book of nature 
instead of being taken merely and solely from the 
books of men. Out yonder in the western skies on 
these evenings and in the early night you see the 
planet Venus shining in her matchless beauty. Now 
any good teacher with the aid of an ugly diagram 
drawn on a blackboard can, in an hour's lesson, 
teach you all about that beautiful planet and its 
complex movements so that you will understand it 
perfectly; and that is the way, and the only way, 
in which it is usually taught in schools and colleges 
— an. hour's lesson on the blackboard, you under- 
stand it perfectly, and you dismiss it from your 
mind forever. By such a lesson you have gained 
some knowledge, have had some mental discipline, 
perhaps, but you have not really assimilated any 
truth of God's. But it would take you eighteen 
months just to read the lesson through in that book 
out yonder — in God's inspired book of nature; nine 
months watching the queenly planet in her royal 
journey up and down among the constellations in 
the western skies as evening star, and then see her 
flash up in the eastern horizon, and nine months up 
and down there as morning star! Once read the 
lesson through that way and you will have assimi- 
lated, mind, heart and soul, one of the sublimest 
truths of God's material universe, and you will have 
added a priceless jewel to the treasures of your mind. 
By such a study of science your whole intellectual 
being is edified and ennobled. You know perfectly 



52 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

well, young ladies, that in this college — down there 
in our Model and in our regular Science Depart- 
ment — you have been carefully taught how to read 
science directly from God's inspired book of nature. 
That book lies out there before you; to you it is an 
open book. You can do nothing better for your own 
higher education than to read from its glowing 
pages. As teachers you can do nothing better for 
the true higher education of the young human souls 
committed to your charge than to lead them forth 
and teach them, while they are yet in the spring- 
time of life, to read truth directly from God's in- 
spired book of nature ! 

But it is very probable, almost certain in fact, that 
much the largest part of your future higher educa- 
tion will be derived from another source than from 
the study of natural science, and that is from the 
study of literature. It is perfectly natural and en- 
tirely right that you should love literature more 
than you love science. That is as it should be. But 
I want to warn you that literature is a very dan- 
gerous thing. There is entirely too much literature 
in the world in our day. There is an enormous, 
oppressive, distracting superabundance and excess 
of literature in the world this nineteenth century. 

A literary plethora pervades our country like a 
disease and it is seriously damaging, I believe, to 
the best powers of the human mind and to the 
strongest and finest qualities of human character. 
"Of the making of many books there is no end," 
said the preacher in disgust five thousand years ago, 
and the saying applies with tenfold force in this 
close of our nineteenth century. Sixty thousand 
books claiming to be new and original were pub- 
lished in the world in the year 1894. I believe the 
world would be better off intellectually, morally and 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 53 

spiritually, if fifty-five thousand of those books had 
never seen the light. Most books are either posi- 
tively bad or perfectly worthless, comparatively few 
are good, and the smallest possible number are real- 
ly great. Young ladies, I have time this morning 
to give you only one piece of advice about your read- 
ing, but I give that very earnestly and very serious- 
ly, and that is: Try to read at least a few of the 
really great books. Read them, study them, absorb 
them, assimilate them, love them, believe in them, 
open your mind, heart and soul freely to their in- 
fluence. If you will only do that you will have noth- 
ing to fear from the pernicious literature that so 
abounds in our day. One of the most fortunate 
things that can happen to a young human soul in 
the process of getting an education is to come strong- 
ly under the influence of a really great, good book. 
And there is no mistaking a really great book. By 
this sign shall you know it, by its power to edify 
and inspire you. It makes no difference what a 
book is about, it makes no difference for what par- 
ticular purpose it is written, it makes no difference 
what literary form it may assume ; the infallible test 
of the real greatness of any book is its edifying and 
its inspiring power. No book is really great that 
does not edify and inspire. 

Of the hundreds of books that I have read in my 
life there are just five that have had a more power- 
ful influence over me, intellectually, morally and 
spiritually, than all the others put together ; they are 
Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Shakespeare, and the 
Bible. I count these as infinitely the greatest books 
that I ever read not because they entertained me so 
mightily, not because they gave me so great instruc- 
tion and knowledge, but because, far beyond all 
others, they edified and inspired me; and if I were 



54 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

going to make out a course of reading for you girls 
this morning I should say, read Ruskin's Sesame 
and Lilies, Ethics of the Dust, Crown of Wild Ol- 
ives. Read Emerson's essays on Character, on Con- 
duct, on Manners, on Self-Reliance, on Transcen- 
dentalism, on Representative Men. Read Carlyle's 
Heroes and Hero Worship, his Sartor Resartus, his 
essays on Burns, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire and 
Characteristics, his biographical sketches of his own 
father, John Carlyle, and his own wife, Jane Welsh 
Carlyle; read Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Lear, 
Macbeth, As You Like It, Midsummer Night's 
Dream. Read in the Bible nearly all that is contain- 
ed in the four gospels and certain selected chapters 
from the Epistles, the Psalms, and from Job, Jere- 
miah and Isaiah. Read these things, and you will 
have read the sublimest truths, the most edifying 
and inspiring truths ever uttered in human 
language; and expressed in a form of per- 
fect beauty absolutely matchless in the whole 
range of the literature of the world. These 
are, in my opinion, just the greatest books 
that have ever been written. In them the human 
mind reached the high-water mark of literary 
achievement. It will never rise so high again. 

All these productions put together would not oc- 
cupy more than three ordinary-sized volumes; but 
don't try to read them in a month or in several 
months. Read them through years; read them 
through all the years of your life; read them as your 
mind and character develop to receive them; read 
them over and over again, read them with all the 
aid you can get to help you understand and appre- 
ciate them. All these productions together would 
perhaps constitute not more than a one-thousandth 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 55 

part of your entire reading, but if you read them 
aright they will have a more powerful and more 
salutary influence over you intellectually, morally 
and spiritually, than all the rest of your reading put 
together. Read these books and such books as these, 
read them, study them, absorb them, assimilate 
them, love them, believe in them, and you will have 
nothing to fear from the inferior, worthless and bad 
books that so abound in our times. All the imps 
and devils, the filth-mongers, babbling fools, puling 
sentimentalists, hysterical women, and perverted 
men, that so infest the world of letters in our day 
will be powerless to harm you. You bear a charmed 
life. You carry in your very blood an antidote to 
the worst poison the vilest book contains. Young 
ladies, in this college you have been taught how to 
read good books, and one of the principal purposes 
of all your studies here has been to prepare your 
minds for high thinking, your hearts for fine feeling. 
A sacred obligation rests upon you to try to bring 
this culture to perfection. A sacred obligation rests 
upon you to beware lest the wicked one sow tares 
among the wheat and when the master of the field 
shall come he will find the harvest ruined. 

Finally, the assimilation of religious truth is a 
part of our higher education. I hesitate to touch 
upon this most profound and most important of all 
subjects. I will advance just this one thought con- 
cerning it : 

There are two classes of truths that Almighty God 
reveals to the mind of man in this human life, name- 
ly, those truths that can be comprehended by the 
understanding and those truths that can not be com- 
prehended by the understanding, but which address 
themselves to that faculty of the mind called intui- 



56 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

tion. Intuition is a finer and higher power than the 
understanding. Understanding bears the same re- 
lation to intuition that the earth's atmosphere bears 
to that finer and more subtle fluid that scientists call 
ether. The atmosphere is wholly "of the earth, 
earthy;" it can be handled and weighed and analyz- 
ed ; it clings close to the earth ; it rises only a little 
above the earth ; but that fine and subtle ether, which 
exists just as certainly as the atmosphere does, is 
an intangible and impalpable substance, and it not 
only permeates all terrestrial things far more subtly 
than the atmosphere, but it rises infinitely higher 
than the atmosphere and brings down to us on its 
ethereal waves the light of sun, moon, and stars and 
all heavenly bodies. Just so> understanding is whol- 
ly "of the earth, earthy," it reveals to the mind of 
man those truths by which he is related to the earth 
and to things of the earth; but there is an intuition 
that transcends the understanding and brings down 
to the longing soul of man those divine truths by 
which he is related to the ever-living God, the arche- 
type of his being; simple, unquestioning, abiding 
belief in those transcendent divine truths and the 
harmonizing of one's life to their promptings, con- 
stitutes the crowning glory of all human existence. 

Young ladies, you have all read that tender story 
how nearly two thousand years ago, just as the beau- 
tiful day was breaking on a sweet spring morning, 
Mary Magdelene went to the tomb of the Saviour 
bearing spices and ointments, but when she got there 
she found the sepulchre empty, the body of the Lord 
was gone, and as she sat there weeping bitterly a 
man approached softly and standing over her asked : 
"Woman, why weepest thou?" Without raising her 
head, and thinking it was the gardener that spoke, 
she cried : "They have taken my Lord away and I 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 57 

know not where they have laid him!" "Mary!" he 
said, and in that tender, loving tone she recognized 
the voice of the Savior himself, and raising her head 
she looked up into his face and falling upon her 
knees at his feet she cried, "Master!" Young ladies, 
the very highest education that any woman ever has 
received or ever can receive in this world is that 
which brought that worshipful "Master!" from 
Mary's lips as she knelt at the Savior's feet. In 
this world of ours, with its sunshine and shadow, 
with its joys and its sorrows, that divine voice still 
speaks to worshipful souls just as tenderly and lov- 
ingly as it spoke to Mary in the Arimathean's gar- 
den two thousand years ago. Oh, may you hearken 
to that voice and may your heart too, like Mary's, 
go out in glad response to it — '"Master!" 

And now, young ladies, in behalf of the faculty 
of the Georgia Normal and Industrial College, I 
must say farewell to you. Many of you have been 
here with us since the very first day that this school 
was opened on that golden October morning, nearly 
four years ago. In the meantime, hundreds of girls 
have come and gone, but "ye have been with us from 
the beginning;" and now you must go too, but like 
Napoleon's "Old Guard," you leave us wearing the 
"crosses of the legion of honor" upon your breast 
and carrying with you the esteem and warm affec- 
tion of these teacher generals under whom you have 
fought so well and nobly the quiet, earnest battles 
of the schoolroom ! 

You have been here with us almost ever since you 
were little girls, and with a tenderer love than you 
can ever know we have watched your growth and 
development in body, in mind, in heart, and in char- 
acter. 

We send you forth believing that you are the 



58 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

"chosen vessels of the Lord," appointed under provi- 
dence to bear in blessings to the people the fruit of 
this tree planted by the rivers of waters. We send 
you forth believing that in your daily lives you will 
demonstrate that every touch of a noble culture be- 
stowed upon a woman's mind is a jewel in the na- 
tion's crown; that every seed of right education 
planted in a woman's heart will bring forth an 
abundant harvest in priceless benefits to the common- 
wealth. We send you forth feeling assured that 
your higher education will redound to the good, to 
the honor, and to the glory of dear old Georgia for 
generations and generations to come, forever and 
forevermore ! 



freely Y<? ftev<? F^ived, yreely (Jiv<?." 



YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class: 
As I stand before you this morning I am 
strongly reminded of that beautiful tenth chap- 
ter of St. Matthew, in which Jesus Christ sends forth 
his twelve disciples to the work to which he had ap- 
pointed them and for which they had been specially 
educated under his divine teaching. That brief dis- 
course is the most powerful missionary sermon that 
was ever preached. It contains the very essence and 
quintessence of the missionary spirit. Its truths 
will never die and its injunctions are of perennial 
application. Many of them apply to you this morn- 
ing just as forcefully as they applied to the twelve 
disciples nineteen hundred years ago, for in the sight 
of God you are missionaries just as much as those 
disciples were missionaries. I love to think of the 
graduates of this college as missionaries. Several 
weeks ago I read an account of the sailing of a ship 
from California for China bearing on board a num- 
ber of women missionaries, among them a noble 
Georgia woman, and as I read I thought to myself, 
"Very well, God speed them, but the girls that go 
out every year from the Georgia Normal and In- 
dustrial College are just as much missionaries as 
those good women are, and these Georgia girls go 
forth into fields of labor more important and where 
the possibilities of doing good are greater than can 
be found in any heathen or in any pagan land." 
Missionary work, like charity, should begin at home. 
Mark you, Jesus Christ in this chapter of St. Mat- 

(59) 



60 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

thew doesn't send his twelve disciples beyond the 
seas or across the deserts or even over the border 
into any far-away or foreign land. He sends them 
out into his own and their own little country of 
Palestine where there was the greatest abundance 
of work for them to do, and so we send you out into 
your own native State of Georgia where there is the 
greatest abundance of work for you to do, where the 
fields are white with the ripening grain, where the 
harvest indeed is plenteous but the laborers are few. 

When on his last visit to us our distinguished and 
beloved State School Commissioner said to me with 
kindling enthusiasm, "Almost wherever I go in the 
State of Georgia I find your girls at work teaching 
in country and in village schools, and wherever I 
find them they are a shining light in the community 
in which they dwell, a veritable blessing to the peo- 
ple among whom they are working. All through 
this commonwealth they are making the desert places 
in Georgia's educational fields to bloom and blossom 
as a rose." I thought to myself, "Thank God for 
this glorious news from the Georgia Normal and 
Industrial College missionaries." 

When from time to time during the past session I 
have received numerous letters and oral communi- 
cations telling me of the splendid work our girls are 
doing in homes and households, in business offices, 
in dressmaking establishments, in schoolrooms, I 
have exclaimed to myself, "Hurrah for the Georgia 
Normal and Industrial College missionaries !" These 
glorious messages that come to me from the four 
quarters of the State are the greatest joy and satis- 
faction of my life. Now when you go out I earnestly 
hope that tidings like these may come back about 
you to be a joy, a satisfaction, an inspiration to the 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 61 

President, to the faculty and the noble founder and 
the faithful trustees of this institution. 

I want you to read that tenth chapter of St. Mat- 
thew and notice how forcefully many of its injunc- 
tions apply to you, either literally or figuratively. 
There is one of them that I want you to consider 
very specially with me this morning ; it seems to me 
so wonderfully apt in its application to you and to 
all graduates of this college. Says Jesus, as a last 
injunction to his departing disciples, "Freely have 
ye received, now freely give!" What a profound 
significance the passage has, or ought to have, for 
every graduate of this college ! Take the first clause 
of it, "Freely have ye received," and consider its 
fine, noble application. This Georgia Normal and 
Industrial College, your Alma Mater, is the free- 
hearted, gracious gift of Georgia's manhood to Geor- 
gia's womanhood. It was given to the women of 
Georgia not at the behest of a. lot of strong-minded 
females, insolently demanding it as woman's right. 
Nay, it came to you at the simple asking of Georgia's 
gentlewomen ; and from the day that the Legislature 
passed the act establishing it six years ago down to 
this sweet June morning it has been more favored 
and blessed and honored and cherished and beloved 
than any other educational institution that ever stood 
on Georgia soil. Everything that the State of Geor- 
gia, poor and impecunious as she is, could afford to 
do she has freely done for this school. The Legis- 
lature has been more partial to it and more liberal to 
it than to any other school in the State. At the last 
session of that body, for instance, when every State 
educational institution was there begging for special 
appropriations for various purposes, all were turned 
away empty-handed, or nearly so, except this col- 
lege; but when it came the State, through her legis- 



62 BACCAIvAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

lators, gave all that was asked, because this was her 
woman's school. 

The Peabody Educational Fund, through our own 
beloved Dr. Curry, has extended to this institution a 
generous helping hand and a tender, fostering care, 
increasing its appropriation to it more and more 
every year. Last summer, when the fund set aside 
by the State for the purpose of making an educa- 
tional exhibit at the Atlanta Exposition came to be 
divided out among the various schools, the directors 
having the matter in charge, by unanimous vote, 
gave the largest share to this school. At that great 
Exposition, the committee of awards, composed of 
some of the most prominent educators in America, 
gave to this school the highest prize and the highest 
praise, although there were nearly one hundred com- 
petitors from all parts of the Union. The whole 
people of Georgia feel, and have always felt, a very 
special, unequaled pride and interest in this school. 
They have compassed it with glory and honor; they 
have crowned it with loving kindness ! I have never 
heard a Georgia man speak of this school that his 
voice did not assume a tender tone, and that the light 
of affection did not kindle in his eye. 

With a liberal hand and a liberal mind and a 
liberal heart the school was established and has been 
maintained; and what a truly liberal education it 
bestows upon its students ! Do you not see, then, in 
what a fine and beautiful and noble sense it is true 
that "freely have ye received ?" Now go forth and 
in the same magnanimous spirit "freely give!" 

I earnestly trust that the education you have re- 
ceived at this college has increased your power to 
give thirtyfold, sixtyfold, an hundredfold. I can 
not conceive how it is possible for any girl to have 
spent from two to four years as you have spent 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 63 

them here in diligent, earnest, zealous application in 
such studies as you have pursued, under such in- 
struction as you have had, without having been en- 
riched in mind and heart and character with treas- 
ures more precious than the gold of Ormus or of 
Ind. Freely have you received these treasures, now 
freely give! When Juliet, Shakespeare's beautiful 
Juliet, pours forth the first outburst of her virgin 
love to Romeo, she exclaims : "My bounty is as 
boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I 
give the more I have to give." So it is with these 
treasures of mind and heart and character — the 
more you give the more you will have to give. The 
more freely you exercise any faculty of your nature 
in unselfish, generous deeds, the stronger that faculty 
will become; nay, the stronger and more powerful 
and more beautiful and more noble your whole na- 
ture will become. Since God created the human 
race by no other means than that has the character 
of man or woman ever grown in strength and beauty 
and nobility. 

Whatever power to do good you may have ac- 
quired by virtue of the education you have had at 
this college let it not lie idle until it becomes atro- 
phied by disuse; use it earnestly, vigorously, freely, 
for the good of humanity, for the uplifting of Geor- 
gia's civilization, and for the glory of the ever-living 
God. Whatever streams of knowledge and intelli- 
gence may have been poured into your receptive 
minds during all the years that you have spent at 
school and at college, let it not stagnate there, "to 
cream and mantle like a standing pond." All 
through Georgia there are desert spots and arid 
places and children thirsting for these living waters ; 
let them flow, freely let them flow. "Freely have 
ye received, freely give." 



64 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

If you will only make a right use of the education 
you have received at this college there is not one 
of you but will be a priceless blessing to the com- 
monwealth of Georgia. If you will only make an 
earnest, generous, right use of the education you 
have received at this college there is not a young 
man who will graduate this summer at the Uni- 
versity at Athens or at the School of Technology, 
or at Emory or at Mercer, who will have it in his 
power to do greater service for his people or his 
State than each of you will have in the manifold 
function of your noble woman's sphere. 

Those of you especially who expect to be school- 
teachers, what an opportunity lies before you ! The 
thing of paramount importance in Georgia to-day is 
the better education of the masses of her children. 
The greatest defect in Georgia's civilization to-day, 
a menace to her future prosperity and advancement, 
is the utter insufficiency and inefficiency of her com- 
mon schools, and every girl that goes out from this 
college and carries the light of the new education 
into the rural districts and teaches a good school 
where hitherto there has been either no school at all 
or only a very poor school is doing, in the sight of 
God and all his holy angels, more real good for her 
people and her State than any so-called statesman 
up yonder in Washington City making typewritten 
speeches on the silver question in the halls of Con- 
gress. 

Every morning in the year as the years go by, as 
I stand here and look into the faces of our assem- 
bled students, I am more and more profoundly im- 
pressed with the great possibilities for good to Geor- 
gia that lie in this her woman's college. A year or 
two ago a person said to me, speaking of one of the 
teachers of our faculty, "Isn't it a pity that a woman 



baccalaureate addresses. 65 

of such ability and such lofty ambition shouldn't 
have a broader sphere of action?" I tell you that 
speech made me hot under the collar, and I replied 
with righteous indignation, "Madam, I can't con- 
ceive how it is possible for any woman on God's 
earth to have a broader sphere, a grander, nobler, 
better work in life than to be a teacher in the Geor- 
gia Normal and Industrial College" ; and I meant 
precisely what I said. I might have said more than 
that. I might have said, "In the name of God what 
do you mean by a broader sphere? Do you think 
that Mary Ellen Lease, cavorting over the country 
making stump speeches to mobs of howling fools, 
has a broader sphere? Do you think that Susan B. 
Anthony and her stripe, running around the land 
hysterically shrieking in a C sharp voice for wo- 
man's rights, has a broader sphere? Do you think 
that Amelie Rives, contaminating the stream of cur- 
rent literature with rot novels, has a broader sphere ? 
Do you think that if this good teacher of ours should 
have a column of fulsome flattery written about her 
in the daily papers, or should get her picture put in 
the Atlanta Constitution as a Georgia beauty, that it 
would be a 'broader sphere ?' " 

What do the women mean by this "broader 
sphere" business any how? Isn't woman's sphere 
already broad enough? Why it is "as broad and 
general as the casing air!" It's as deep as the hu- 
man heart; it's as high as the throne of God! In 
the sweep of its horizon is contained all things that 
mankind holds dearest and most precious and that 
most deeply concern human existence in this 
world. It includes everything that is essentially 
feminine; it excludes, as it should exclude, only 
those things that are essentially masculine. It in- 
cludes music, art, literature, all womanly industrial 

5 ba 



66 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

pursuits, society, religion, schoolroom, college hall, 
home, wifehood, motherhood ! It embraces those 
occupations upon which the welfare and happiness 
of the human race, the progress of civilization, and 
the salvation of man's immortal soul chiefly depend, 
and the right discharge of which requires the exer- 
cise of the highest and best and finest powers of 
mind, heart and character. What do you want with 
a "broader sphere" than that? Not to make wo- 
man's sphere any broader or deeper or higher than 
it already is, but to fit her better for the sphere which 
time out of mind has been open to her, which 
Almighty God intended for her, and which she needs 
must fill with her deeds, good or bad, is the supreme 
duty that modern civilization owes to womanhood, 
and it is precisely for the purpose of discharging that 
duty to the young women of Georgia that this col- 
lege was established. And if the graduates of this 
college disappoint us not, the time is about to come, 
nay, is already at hand, when Georgia will clearly 
see and gladly proclaim that the very best invest- 
ment she ever made was the money that she put into 
the establishment and maintenance of this her wo- 
man's college. 

The time is not far distant when Georgia, in 
every fiber of her complex social system and through- 
out the length and breadth of her civilization, will 
realize the refining, the beautifying, the uplifting 
and ennobling power of this her woman's college. 
Already she is beginning to feel through all the 
nerve-centers of her being its energizing, vitaliz- 
ing, inspiring influence. Already the people 
rise up and call the institution blessed, and are say- 
ing to its noble founder, "you builded better than 
you knew." 

Some months ago one of your number came to 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 67 

me and asked me to suggest a suitable motto for the 
Senior class. I didn't do it because I couldn't think 
of anything appropriate. But I do wish now, as a 
last word to' you, to call your attention to a motto 
which you can not adopt as yours, but the essential 
spirit of which I hope will always animate you. It 
is that grand old French expression that comes down 
to us from the days of chivalry, "Noblesse 
Oblige!" Its literal translation is, "The nobility 
are under obligations!" and it means that persons 
belonging to the nobility having been specially fa- 
vored by birth and by fortune, having had the very 
best advantages in every way, being deferred to and 
looked up to by the great masses of the people, 
ought to feel under obligations to show themselves, 
in all the relations and duties and conduct of life, 
superior to ordinary people; ought to be more re- 
fined in manners, more cultured in conversation, 
more gracious in deportment, more generous of 
heart, more magnanimous of soul, more patriotic, 
more self-sacrificing, more heroic, gentler in peace 
and braver in war! Now it seems to me that a 
spirit like that ought to animate the graduates of 
this college. The circumstances under which this 
school was established; the almost sacred purpose 
to which it is devoted ; the pure ideals of scholarship 
and of conduct which, through thick and thin, 
through evil report and good report, it has striven 
to maintain ; the favors and blessings that have been 
showered upon it ; the love and affection with which 
it has been cherished; the deep pride and interest 
that the whole State feels in it; the great hopes and 
expectations that a people's heart has garnered in 
it, ought, it seems to me, to give to this institution 
a wonderful moral power — ought, it seems to me, 
to have a very inspiring and ennobling influence on 



68 BACCM,AUR£AT£ ADDRESSES. 

the mind and the heart and the character of its stu- 
dents, and every graduate that goes forth from its 
doors ought to feel under a glad, joyous obligation 
to illustrate, as far as in her lies, by her whole walk 
and conduct in life, the best and truest and noblest 
type of Georgia womanhood! My dear young 
friends, I earnestly trust that a spirit like that may 
animate you through all your lives and that to each 
one of you it may ever be an inspiring thought, "I 
am a graduate of the Georgia Normal and Indus- 
trial College, noblesse oblige." 



51?<? Styreefold Edueatior;. 



YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Class: 
The subject of my address to you to-day will 
be the Threefold Education. The human mind 
is a trinity. It is composed of three powers — the 
power to think, the power to feel, and the power to 
do. Thinking power, feeling power, doing power 
— these three in all their manifold forms and mani- 
festations, in all their complex and intricate rela- 
tions constitute that wonderful organism which we 
call mind. The special organ of the thinking power 
is the intellect; the special organ of the feeling 
power are the affections; the special organ of the 
doing power is the will. The object of education 
is to develop, strengthen, discipline, train, and direct 
these three powers of the mind — the intellect, or 
thinking power; the affections, or feeling power; 
and the will, or doing power. So there are three 
kinds of education — education of the intellect, edu- 
cation of the affections, education of the will. 

The main purpose of schools and colleges is to 
educate the intellect or thinking power of the mind. 
I believe, of course, that every good school and every 
good college does also much incidentally and indi- 
rectly towards the education of the affections and 
the will, but that is not their express purpose, that 
is not their reason for being, that is not the work for 
which they are organized. I repeat that the main 
purpose of schools and colleges is to educate the 
intellect, or thinking power of the mind. The ob- 
ject of all thinking is to see truth. So the main pur- 

(69) 



70 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

pose of schools and colleges is to educate the human 
intellect to see truth. In every school and in the 
college that you have attended the main purpose has 
been, or at least should have been, to educate your 
intellect to see truth — mathematical truth, scientific 
truth, historic truth, poetic truth, moral truth, spirit- 
ual truth. You have received, or are supposed to 
have received, what is called an higher education. 
What does that mean? It means that your intellect 
has been developed, expanded, disciplined, trained 
and directed to see truth in its higher and finer forms 
and manifestations, in its broader relations, in its 
more comprehensive applications. 

There is something very grand about the genesis 
of an higher education. Now I want you to follow 
me closely for a little while to see if we can not get 
a clear idea of what is the genesis of an higher edu- 
cation. This, it seems to me, is a fair presentation 
of it: Intellect is that power by which the human 
mind sees truth. The more intellect a person has, 
the greater his power of seeing truth. A man's 
ability to see truth is the measure of his intellect. 
Every now and then a great intellect, a truly great 
intellect, is born into this world of ours. It looks 
out on the universe, on that same universe on which 
all intellects have gazed for ages, but this great in- 
tellect, looking in this direction or that direction, 
sees more profoundly, more clearly, more finely into 
this thing or that thing than any intellect ever saw 
before, and so discovers some truth of God, hitherto 
unseen by the mind of man. The discoverer, this 
great seer, turns in rapture and points his discovery 
out to his fellow beings, and those of them who have 
enough intellect, see it clearly; they clap their 
hands in joy and cry, "Lo, it is true!" And so an- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 71 

other note in the divine harmony of the universe 
bursts upon the listening ears of men. 

For instance, about four hundred years ago there 
was born in Prussia a man by the name of Coper- 
nicus ; he was one of these great intellects ; he looked 
out on the universe in the direction of the starlit 
skies, those same starlit skies on which all men had 
gazed for ages, but the great intellect of Copernicus 
saw more profoundly, more clearly, more finely into 
those star depths than any intellect had ever seen 
before, and so he discovered there that great cen- 
tral truth that governs and controls all those starry- 
hosts of the heavens. Coming after him and stand- 
ing on the vantage-ground of his discovery other 
intellects looking at the heavens in this direction and 
that direction made discovery after discovery, added 
truth unto truth, law unto law, until the whole sub- 
lime science of astronomy stood revealed to 1 the mind 
of man. Sir Isaac Newton was another one of these 
great seers. Sitting in his orchard one summer 
afternoon, he saw an apple fall from a tree. With 
his great, penetrating intellect he gazed at that most 
familiar fact, until he discovered in it the laws of 
gravitation, that great truth which is the keystone 
to the arch of the material universe. In like man- 
ner all of the natural sciences have had their origin 
and development. Then altogether another class 
or kind of great seers, like Homer and Dante and 
Browning and Shakespeare with their keen, incisive 
intellects looked into the mighty drama of human 
life and into the mysteries of the human heart, and 
so have given us the finest and highest truths of 
poetry. And still another class of great seers like 
Plato and Aristotle and Francis Bacon and Herbert 
Spencer have given us the most comprehensive 



72 baccalaureate addresses. 

truths of philosophy. And so on through the whole 
mighty range of learning and knowledge and wis- 
dom and truth. 

Now, young ladies, as unappreciative and sordid 
and frivolous as people seem to us to be when we 
are in our pessimistic moods, yet this great comfort- 
ing fact remains, that after all there is really noth- 
ing in this world that mankind values so highly as 
they do these revelations of truth made by the great 
seers of the universe. They guard them as precious 
treasures; they hand them down from generation 
to generation ; they preserve them in blessed books ; 
they establish colleges and universities to teach them 
to the youth of the land ; and when children gather 
around their parents with that eager cry that ever 
flows from the young human soul, "What good thing 
can you show us?" the parents answer, "The best 
things to show you are the revelations made by the 
great seers of the universe," and so they send their 
sons and their daughters to colleges and universi- 
ties to have their intellects developed, disciplined, 
ennobled, to have their souls edified, to have their 
spirits refined and inspired by the study and assimi- 
lation of the high and beautiful truths that the great 
seers of the universe have revealed. That is higher 
education. It is a blessed privilege to have an higher 
education. That privilege to some extent at least, 
you have enjoyed at this college. And I know that 
every one of these fine and high truths that your 
mind has really assimilated will be a blessing to 
your life and to every other life with which your life 
shall come in contact. I believe your whole nature 
has been enriched and your power for doing good 
has been greatly increased by reason of the higher 
education you have received at this college. A sa- 
cred obligation rests upon you to use that power 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 73 

earnestly and conscientiously. A sacred obligation 
rests upon you not to allow the seed of high think- 
ing that has been planted in your mind to be over- 
grown and choked to death by the rank weeds of 
worldliness and frivolity. You have been taught to 
read and understand and enjoy the productions of 
the greatest minds of earth ; now just as soon as you 
leave college don't abandon these entirely to waste 
your time and stultify your intellect with every 
fashionable novel that comes from the press "wet 
with the latest spray of folly." Don't turn from the 
Pierian springs to slake your thirst with ditch-water. 
You have studied the lives of some of the greatest 
heroes that ever breathed the breath of life; then 
surely you ought never to be little-souled and mean- 
spirited. You have watched the ever-burning stars 
of God in their sublime courses through the heavens ; 
then surely you ought never to be narrow minded 
about anything under the sun. 

Man is the noblest thing in the universe; mind 
is the noblest thing in man; intellect is the noblest 
thing in mind; and the noblest function of intellect 
is not to pry into things with narrow cunning, not 
to regard things with foxy shrewdness, not to 
handle things for your own little, mean, selfish pur- 
poses, but to see things in their large relations, to 
trace them to everlasting verities, and to recognize 
in them that unity in diversity "whose voice is the 
harmony of the universe and whose seat is the 
bosom of God!" The aim of higher education is 
to bring the human intellect up to the performance 
of this, its highest function. 

It is a very abrupt transition to pass from the 
education of the intellect to the education of the 
affections. Necessarily so, because there is no close 
connection between the intellect and the affections. 



74 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

The possession of a great intellect indicates nothing, 
either one way or the other, as to the qualities of the 
heart and a purely intellectual education has no 
tendency to make people practically better hearted 
or kinder hearted. The heart must have its own 
education, quite distinct from the education of the 
head ; and there are few things in a woman's life of 
greater concern than this education of the heart. I 
say emphatically in a woman's life, because I believe 
the affections play a more important part in the 
lives of women than they do in the lives of men. 
"Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's 
whole existence," says the poet Byron. That is not 
altogether so, but there is a great deal of truth in it. 
In woman's nature beyond the horizon of the intel- 
lect sweeps the horizon of the affections. Deeper 
than her desire for knowledge or wealth or fame or 
power is her desire to love and to be loved. 

However strong her intellect may be, however 
mighty her will may be, the affections are still the 
dominant power of her being. In the exercise of 
the affections she finds the greatest satisfaction of 
her life. The affections are the crowning glory of 
her womanhood. Through the affections she con- 
trols, far more than she knows, the destinies of the 
human race. How important it is then that her 
affections should be educated! That education is 
not to be had from schools or colleges or from books. 
It is not to be had by reading sentimental novels 
and crying over them. It is not to be had by going 
to the theatre and being deeply stirred by these 
pathetic, emotional plays. It is not to be had by 
listening to grandiloquent sermons on the "father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man." Litera- 
ture and discourses like these create in the human 
heart a strong sentimental, subjective emotion that 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 75 

is very pleasant, very self-satisfying; but they do 
not really educate the affections, they do not make 
people practically better hearted or kinder hearted. 
The greatest preacher of the gospel of Love that the 
world ever saw was Jesus Christ; but if you will 
notice whenever Jesus Christ uses that word "love" 
he never means by it merely the sentimental, sub- 
jective emotion; he always means by it the feeling 
that shows itself in some unselfish, objective deed 
of human kindness. Take for instance that beauti- 
ful tenth chapter of St. Luke where with so much 
unction he announces the doctrine, "Love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself," and when the smart young man in the 
crowd, thinking to entrap him, calls out, "And who 
is my neighbor?" Jesus replies by simply narrat- 
ing the story of the good Samaritan, closing with 
the injunction, "Go thou and do likewise!" So I 
say to you, young ladies — "Go- thou and do> like- 
wise !" I once heard of a poor emigrant, who, with 
his wife and little children and all of his possessions, 
was traveling through the country in a two-horse 
wagon. While they were passing through a little 
town on their journey the horses became frightened 
and ran away, tearing the wagon all to pieces and 
breaking and ruining much of the furniture. A 
crowd of curious spectators gathered around the 
wreck and around the poor woe-begone man and 
the weeping woman, with expressions of pity, "Oh, 
how sorry I am!" but without offering any help. 
At last a big, rough-looking man in the crowd, hold- 
ing a bank-bill up overhead in his hand, called out, 
"How much are you sorry? I am sorry ten dollars' 
worth!" and handed the money to the distressed 
family to help repair the damage. That illustrates 
the difference between the subjective emotion and 
objective deed of kindness. Not by thinking chari- 



76 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

table thoughts, not by feeling tender hearted but 
only by habitually doing unselfish deeds of human 
kindness can the affections be educated. 

I hope you girls will never forget the fine talk that 
Dr. Payne gave us on this very line, over yonder in 
the Mansion Study Hall, when he was here two 
years ago. I hope you will never forget those two 
impressive illustrations that he narrated to us : that 
incident which he himself witnessed, of the Epis- 
copal preacher, who, after reading the burial service 
over the grave of the dead child, turned his back 
upon the heart-broken, weeping young father and 
mother without one word of comfort or even of rec- 
ognition ; and that other still more deeply impressive 
illustration of grand old Thomas Carlyle, who, 
twenty years after the death of his beloved wife, 
uttered from a remorseful heart those eloquent words 
of warning, "Dost thou intend a kindness to thy be- 
loved ones? Do it straightway, while the baleful 
future is not here!" 

My young friends, there are very few persons in 
this world who have reached their majority who 
have not reason to feel the reproach contained in 
these two illustrations. God grant that you may 
never have reason to feel so keenly as many of us 
ought to feel those words of Carlyle, "Dost thou in- 
tend a kindness to thy beloved one ? Do it straight- 
way while the baleful future is not here!" Speak 
the kind word, do the kind deed habitually, thought- 
fully, unselfishly, to every human being with whose 
life your life shall come in contact whenever oppor- 
tunity offers and occasion calls, that is the way to 
educate the affections. 

We come lastly to the education of the will. That 
is the most important part of every person's educa- 
tion, because the ultimate aim of education is the 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 77 

formation of character, but character is determined 
by the quality and condition of the will. In the be- 
ginning of this part of my subject let me say that in 
my opinion there is a tendency in the popular mind 
to overaggrandize what is called will power, or 
strength of will. Most people talk as if they thought 
strength of will was the most admirable attribute of 
man's nature. But that is a great mistake. Strength 
of will per se, or in itself, is not a virtue; its merit 
depends entirely upon its relation to the intellect, the 
affections, and the conscience. A great intellect and 
a warm heart are in themselves always admirable, 
and more or less ennoble every person that possesses 
them, or either of them, whatever his faults or his 
shortcomings in other directions may be; but such 
is not the case with strength of will. Some of the 
meanest, most despicable, most utterly detestable hu- 
man beings that I have ever known in my life have 
possessed great strength of will. Some of the dull- 
est, stupidest, most mutton-headed, most narrow- 
minded people that I have known in my life pos- 
sessed wonderfully strong wills. Some of the mean- 
est girls that I have ever known in my life have pos- 
sessed remarkable will power. In fact, as a general 
rule, when will power sticks out so prominently in a 
person's character that it forms the most conspicuous 
feature in his character, it is a bad sign. The most 
disagreeable people in the world are frequently con- 
stituted that way. These selfish, tyrannical, over- 
bearing, domineering people are generally consti- 
tuted that way. Whenever will power greatly out- 
weighs the intellect and the affections, it indicates a 
bad nature. The hatefulest and most pernicious peo- 
ple in this world are constituted that way. No, as I 
have said, a strong will per se, or in itself, is not a 
virtue. Strength of will is admirable only when it is 



78 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

lighted by the intellect, inspired by the affections, 
and controlled by the conscience. That is the idea 
that rough old David Crockett had in mind when he 
uttered that immortal epigram, "Be sure you are 
right, and then go ahead!" 

Now, young ladies, even at the risk of being tedi- 
ous and tiresome, I do wish, as the closing part of 
my address to 1 you to-day, to give you three or four 
practical rules for the education of the will. I do 
this because I sincerely believe if you will heed and 
practice these rules it will be of real value in the up- 
building and perfecting of your characters. 

The first rule that I would give you for the edu- 
cation of your will is this : Learn, when duty calls, 
to do what you don't feel like doing. Do what you 
don't feel like doing! 

I once knew a man who when in the prime of life 
was stricken with a severe attack of inflammatory 
rheumatism which settled in his knee-joints. He 
said to his physician one day, "Doctor, can I ever 
be cured of this terrible malady?" "Yes," replied 
the doctor, "you are already getting well, and in the 
course of a month or two- you will be entirely cured 
as far as the disease itself is concerned, but I am 
sorry to tell you that it is going to leave you with 
stiff knee-joints and all the rest of your life you will 
have to hobble with a stick." "Doctor," said the 
man, "is there no way to avoid that calamity?" 
"Yes," answered the doctor, "if you would stand 
erect for an hour every day, a half hour in the morn- 
ing and a half hour in the afternoon, and work your 
knee-joints up and down vigorously, like a soldier 
marking double-quick time, the stiffness- would be 
entirely prevented; but you couldn't do that, the 
pain would be so great that no human being could 
stand it." "Doctor," said the man, "if what you say 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 79 

is true, I shall never have stiff knee-joints!" And so 
every day for a month after that for a half hour in 
the morning and for a half hour in the afternoon 
that man stood erect and worked his knee-joints up 
and down vigorously like a soldier marking double- 
quick time. Every movement caused him the most 
excruciating, agonizing pain, so much SO' that his 
family and friends begged him to desist, but he per- 
sisted in doing it, consequently the suppleness of his 
knee-joints was perfectly restored, and he preserved 
to extreme old age wonderful physical strength and 
activity. Now you may be sure that that man didn't 
feel like working his knee-joints up and down, but 
he had strength of will to do' what he didn't feel like 
doing, and great was his reward. Thousands and 
thousands of people, nay nearly all of us in fact, go 
through life more or less stiff- jointed and hobbling 
in body, intellect, and in character because we have 
not sufficiently disciplined ourselves to do what we 
don't feel like doing. All through your life, young 
ladies, duty, duty to yourself, duty to your family, 
duty to your neighbor, duty to your God will call on 
you to do things that you don't feel like doing; from 
such a small thing as getting up from your comfort- 
able bed when the rising-bell rings in the morning to 
some supreme duty which some day may confront 
you, the performance of which will test the highest 
heroism of your nature and wring your heart-strings 
with agony. 

There is no better education for the will than this : 
Always to do promptly and uncomplainingly in small 
things and great things what you ought to do, with- 
out the least consideration as to whether you feel 
like doing it or not. Bear that injunction in mind. 
Now while you are young accustom yourselves to do 
what you don't feel like doing. 



80 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

The second rule that I would give you for the edu- 
cation of the will is the converse of the one that I 
have just given. It is this : Accustom yourself not 
to do what you feel like doing. Don't do what you 
feel like doing ! I once knew a man who had been 
an habitual drunkard for twenty years. During the 
whole of that time scarcely a day had passed that he 
hadn't drunk from a pint to a quart of whisky and 
scarcely a week had passed that he hadn't gone home 
at least once staggering drunk. One day as he en- 
tered his house in that condition he held out his arms 
in maudlin affection to his little three-year-old baby 
girl, his youngest child, his only daughter, the dar- 
ling of his heart. The child perceiving his condition 
shrank from him in repulsion and disgust. It cut 
him to the heart as nothing had ever done before. 
He raised his hands towards heaven and said, "So 
help me God, I will never drink another drop!" and 
he never did. I have myself heard that man tell in 
vivid and touching language of the terrible suffer- 
ings he endured in his fight against the evil habit. 
Dives in the torments of hell, calling to Father Abra- 
ham for a drop of water to cool his burning tongue, 
felt no more torturing thirst than that poor man felt 
for his accustomed drink of liquor, but he touched 
it not. After a few months of struggle he conquered 
not only the habit but the taste itself. Consequently, 
instead of going down to a premature drunkard's 
grave, leaving his family a heritage of shame, he 
lived to old age, healthy, happy, honorable and hon- 
ored. It is impossible to imagine how any human 
being could feel more like doing anything than that 
man felt like taking his accustomed drink of liquor, 
but he had strength of will not to do what he felt 
like doing, and great was his reward. There is no 
finer discipline for the will than this: To accustom 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 81 

yourself when duty demands, not to do what you feel 
like doing. 

The third rule that I would give you for the edu- 
cation of the will is this : Don't be wilful ! Do- you 
know what that word wilful means? You know 
what is meant by a wilful child. It means the most 
disagreeable kind of a child. It means a child that 
always insists on having his way, and is utterly heed- 
less of all appeals either to his reason or his affec- 
tions. Well, there are wilful grown people as well 
as wilful children. And pardon me for saying it, 
but I believe women are more prone to that fault 
than men are. I have seen good women, women of 
culture and refinement, cause serious trouble in im- 
portant affairs of life just because they would not 
give up their way, not from any deep convic- 
tions that their way was the only right way, 
but simply because it happened to be their way, 
originated with them, suited their convenience. 
I say I have often seen women show great will 
power in that way; but that is a very mean way. 
That is sheer egotism of the will, and egotism of the 
will is the worst kind of egotism. Beware of that 
fault. Don't try to have your way just for the sake 
of having your way. Especially if you should ever 
be actively connected with any affair of public or 
general or social interest, try to rid yourself of all 
egotism, of all personalism, be objective and not sub- 
jective. Avoid egotism of will, cultivate imperson- 
alism of will — that is the third rule that I would 
give you for the education of the will. 

The fourth and last rule that I would give you for 
the education of the will is this : Don't allow your 
individuality to be dominated by the will of another. 
You frequently hear it said that such and such a 
person is completely under the influence of such an- 

6 ba 



82 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

other person. For instance, "J ane Smith is com- 
pletely under the influence of Sarah Brown ; Sarah 
can just twist her about her fingers" — that is what 
I mean by domination. I am always sorry for a 
person that falls under that kind of domination of 
another person. It is bad for you to fall under that 
kind of domination of another person even if that 
person is greatly superior to yourself. But unfortu- 
nately it frequently happens that the dominor is in- 
ferior to the dominee. In other words, it frequently 
happens that a superior nature falls under the moral 
dominance of an inferior nature. I have seen many 
instances of that sort myself. I have seen in- 
stances of that sort right here among the students 
of this college. I have seen right here among the 
students of this college instances where one girl 
would fall more or less completely under the influ- 
ence of another girl who was inferior to her in in- 
tellect, inferior to her in heart, inferior to her in con- 
science, inferior to her in every way except in will 
power or force of character ; that was the weak point 
in the dominated one and that is how she came to be 
dominated. So, I say, it frequently happens that a 
superior nature falls under the moral dominance of 
an inferior nature. Shakespeare in his great trage- 
dies gives us some striking illustrations of this. The 
wily Cassius dominated the far nobler Brutus. The 
hateful Iago dominated the great-hearted, magnani- 
mous Othello. The utterly wicked Lady Macbeth 
dominated the partially wicked Macbeth. She com- 
pletely paralyzed his better inclinations, which but 
for her would undoubtedly have prevailed. That 
animated dialogue between the husband and wife 
just before the murder of Duncan is a regular wrest- 
ling-match between a strong bad will and a weak 
good will. 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 83 

It also frequently happens that one person allows 
his intellect to be completely dominated by the in- 
tellect of another person. Here is a very notable 
illustration of that : George Eliot, one of the great- 
est women writers that the world ever saw, had her 
beautiful, glorious, feminine genius literally ruined 
because she allowed her intellect to be dominated by 
the intellect of George Henry Lewes and Herbert 
Spencer and other masculine, hard-thinking, dry 
thinking philosophers. When she was a girl, a coun- 
try girl, from the pure depths of her own inspiration 
and intuitions she wrote Adam Bede, one of the 
finest productions that ever came from a woman's 
brain. Then she went to London where she became 
acquainted with those masculine, hard-thinking, dry- 
thinking philosophers. They made a great pet of 
her. They undertook to educate and develop her. 
She gladly put herself under their tutelage. She 
allowed her intellect to be completely dominated by 
their intellect, and from that very moment her works 
began to deteriorate, and she ended at last by writ- 
ing that wretched philosophical production, Theo- 
phrastus Such; and it is said that that brilliant, 
gifted woman, that poor deluded wretch believed to 
the last day of her life that that miserable, philo- 
sophic rot, Theophrastus Such, was the best thing 
she ever wrote. Her mind had lost its spring and 
spontaneity, her soul had lost its intuitions and in- 
spirations; the splendid God-given powers of her 
individual genius had collapsed and gone to ruin 
because she allowed her intellect to be dominated by 
the intellect of others. Young ladies, I have seen 
instances like that among ordinary people. I have 
seen teachers dominate the minds of their pupils 
until they could not think an independent thought. 
I have seen parents dominate the whole nature of 
their children until they could not call their souls 



84 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

their own. I have seen sons who were but weak 
echoes of their fathers; I have seen daughters who 
were but weak echoes of their mothers. I have seen 
many persons, and especially school-teachers, who 
had been so long and so completely dominated by 
ideas that they got from books that they had well 
nigh lost the power of seeing anything with their 
own individual eyes or observing anything with their 
own individual minds. That sort of dominance is 
always pernicious. It means an arrested develop- 
ment, a stunted growth, an artificial character, the 
weakening or nullifying of the spontaneous and best 
powers of one's nature. Young ladies, if you should 
ever feel that kind of dominance, from whatever 
source it may come, tightening down upon your 
faculties of mind or heart or character, summon all 
the will power with which the Almighty has en- 
dowed you, and shake yourself free from the bond- 
age; preserve your individuality! That is the end 
of my speech to you to-day. I thank you for your 
patient hearing. Pardon me for having detained 
you so long. 

I am glad that the Almighty has vouchsafed so 
beautiful a morning as this for your graduating day. 
All nature seems to sympathize with this occasion! 
This good earth of ours seems as fresh and fair to- 
day as it was six thousand years ago when in the 
Garden of Eden the first roses bloomed! She is 
garlanded with her noblest verdure, her breath is 
redolent with the fagrance of her sweetest flowers, 
and across her heavenly brow these nights she wears 
a diadem of her most glorious stars. May these 
aspects of nature, so lovely, so inspiring, be typical, 
symbolic of your future lives. 

God bless you, and sanctify your being to His 
honor and glory in this world and in the world to 
come forever and forevermore! 



" Deep Calls Upto Deep." 



YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Class : I 
have often thought that it would be best for 
me to abandon the practice of making this 
annual farewell speech to the graduating class, be- 
cause any words that I can utter always seem to me 
so totally inadequate to express the feelings of my 
heart or to do justice to< the beauty, the tenderness, 
the deep significance of this occasion. I believe that 
every person in this large audience feels with me at 
this moment that it is one of those occasions when, 
to use the beautiful words of the Psalmist, "deep 
calls unto deep." And I shall take that little sen- 
tence as the theme of my discourse to you this morn- 
ing — "Deep Calls Unto Deep." That is what I want 
to talk to you about to-day — "deep calls unto deep." 

The human soul has its shallows and the human 
soul has its deeps, and the universe that environs the 
human soul has its shallows and has its deeps, and 
the shallow things of the universe are continually 
calling upon the shallows in the human soul and the 
deep things of the universe are continually calling 
unto the deeps in the human soul : Shallow calls 
unto shallow, deep calls unto deep. 

Several years ago during that great exposition in 
Atlanta, I sat one night with a crowd of ten thousand 
people on the sloping terraces overlooking the exposi- 
tion grounds, and I saw the most magnificent display 
of fireworks that I had ever witnessed. It was gor- 
geous, brilliant, dazzling beyond description, and 
that whole crowd of ten thousand human beings went 

(85) 



86 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

into ecstasies of delight over the spectacle, and the 
biggest fool in that crowd enjoyed that show as 
much as the finest intellect there. It was shallow 
calling unto shallow. It flashed up and went out, 
and was as if it had never been. In less than one 
hour it was all over and darkness settled upon the 
earth again; and then I just happened to look up 
and I saw all the stars of God, those ineffable, be- 
guiling stars which, through all the ages, have sung 
their silent songs to the hearts of men, which through 
all the ages have been the object of profoundest 
study to the finest minds of earth, which through all 
the ages have been an inspiration to poets and to de- 
vout and worshipful souls — I saw those quiet, eter- 
nal stars looking serenely down from the high heav- 
ens on that foolish crowd that had gone wild over 
the bursting of sky-rockets, and somehow the stars 
never seemed so beautiful and sublime to> me as they 
did that night after that fanfaronade of fireworks; 
and I thought to myself : Here are two symbols of 
human life; thai was shallow calling unto shallow; 
there is deep calling unto deep. 

All through your life, young ladies, you will meet 
with experiences like that. All through your life 
from the universe without there will come to your 
soul within calls, shallow calls and deep calls — shal- 
low calling unto- shallow, and deep calling unto deep. 
In the books that you read, in the persons that you 
meet, in the events of your own life, in the work that 
you do, there will be shallows and there will be 
deeps, shallow calling unto shallow, and deep calling 
unto deep; and your soul, your spirit, your whole 
nature will get its education by responding to these 
calls — shallow responding unto shallow, and deep 
responding unto deep. 

In the first place, in the books that you read, you 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 87 

will find shallow-calling books, and you will find 
deep-calling books. Several years ago, as you doubt- 
less remember, a book by the name of "Trilby" was 
published, and all the fools in the world, and nearly 
all the wise people, too, went wild over "Trilby" ; 
and certainly it was a very charming book, written 
by a bright and gifted man, and the biggest fool that 
read it could appreciate it for all that it was worth 
about as much as the wisest man that read it — it 
was shallow calling unto shallow. More than three 
centuries ago William Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," 
and for all these three hundred years the study of 
that play has been a perpetual delight and joy to the 
finest intellects of earth, and for all the ages to come 
it will continue to be to profoundest minds deep call- 
ing unto deep. So there are shallow-calling books 
and there are deep-calling books ; and there are also 
shallow-calling speakers and deep-calling speakers. 
There is living in this country at this time a very 
brilliant man who goes around delivering lectures. 
His name is Robert Ingersoll, or Bob Ingersoll, as he 
is familiarly called. Last winter this Bob Ingersoll 
delivered one of his fascinating lectures up here in 
Atlanta, and by the universal agreement of all who 
heard it, the finest part of that lecture was what he 
had to say about the preciousness of children; the 
passage was so beautiful that it was copied in many 
of our daily newspapers and was read by thousands 
of people. I read it myself and it certainly was a 
masterpiece of exquisite word-painting. But nearly 
two thousand years ago another lecturer in a little 
impromptu speech of less than a dozen words dis- 
cussed precisely that same subject, the preciousness 
of children. It happened this way: "And they 
brought young children unto him that he might lay 
his hands upon them, and the disciples rebuked those 



88 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

that brought them; but when Jesus saw it he was 
much displeased, and said unto them : Suffer little 
children to come unto me and forbid them not, for 
of such is the kingdom of God. Verily, I say unto 
you, whosoever does not receive the kingdom of 
heaven as a little child, shall in nowise enter therein. 
And he took them up in his arms and laid his hands 
upon them and blessed them." As long as the hu- 
man race endures, and for centuries after the pretty 
conceits of Mr. Bob Ingersoll shall have fallen into 
oblivion, that little speech of Jesus Christ's will con- 
tinue to appeal to mother-hearts, deep calling unto 
deep. My dear young friends, in our day and time 
there is an abundance and a very excessive super- 
abundance of books of the "Trilby" kind, and speak- 
ers of the Bob Ingersoll kind, bright, smart, clever, 
witty, brilliant books and speakers, but most of them, 
or quite all of them, are but shallow calling unto 
shallow. 

Some of these books are undoubtedly good, strong 
books well worth reading, books that all young peo- 
ple like yourselves ought to read, because the shal- 
lows of man's nature must be educated as well as the 
deeps. It is just as important to educate the shal- 
lows as it is to educate the deeps; and as a matter 
of fact much the larger portion of the education of 
most people necessarily consists in the education of 
the shallows. So I do not mean by what I have said 
to make a wholesale condemnation of all present-day 
literature. But what I do wish to say to* you in all 
seriousness is this : If you confine your reading ex- 
clusively even to the very best books now being pro- 
duced, the great deeps of your spirit will never be 
touched; if you confine your thinking to what is 
called the modern progressive trend of thought, the 
greatest and noblest powers with which the Almighty 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 89 

has endowed your mind will become atrophied from 
sheer disuse. Not one book in ten thousand reaches 
or is capable of reaching the great deeps of the hu- 
man spirit. If I should speak entirely from my own 
individual experience I would say that only two 
writers of the English language in this nineteenth 
century have reached the very deeps, and they are 
the American Emerson and the English Carlyle. Of 
course there are others, but with them I am not per- 
sonally acquainted, and in this last talk that I shall 
make to you I am determined to speak exclusively 
from my own experience and observation, and from 
the deepest convictions of my own individual mind 
and heart. After you leave school I want to beg you 
to try Emerson and Carlyle, Carlyle especially, for 
not only in my own humble opinion, but in the judg- 
ment of the finest intellects of this time, his is the 
most powerful, deepest-calling voice that has spoken 
to the spirit of man in this nineteenth century. I 
want you to read Carlyle' s lectures on Heroes and 
Hero Worship; his essays on Robert Burns, Samuel 
Johnson, Voltaire, Rousseau, and that remarkable 
essay on Characteristics, and also those matchless 
little gems of biography, his sketch of his own father, 
John Carlyle, and his own wife, Jane Welch Car- 
lyle; and I want you to read from Emerson his es- 
says on Nature, Self-Reliance, Behavior, Manners, 
Spiritual Laws and so on. I sincerely believe if you 
will read, absorb, and assimilate these things you 
will have harkened to the very deepest-calling voices 
that have spoken to the human spirit in this nine- 
teenth century. But, young ladies, you must go> much 
further back than the nineteenth century to find the 
very deepest calling of all books, that oldest of all 
books, the Hebrew Bible ; Holy Bible, we call it. It 
is a sacred book to us because it teaches the religion 



90 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

in which we believe, but leaving entirely out of con- 
sideration its sacred or religious character and re- 
garding it as mere human literature, the Bible is still 
the grandest book that ever has been written. If I 
were an atheist like Voltaire and believed the Bible 
to be the exponent of a baleful superstition, if I were 
a materialist like Herbert Spencer and believed the 
religion of the Bible to be a delusion and a dream, 
if I were a blatant agnostic like Bob Ingersoll and 
believed the doctrines of the Bible to be a lie, I 
should still say that as mere human literature the 
Bible is the grandest book that ever has been written 
and a priceless treasure to< mankind. In clearness 
and depth of insight into human nature and human 
life, in the vivid portraiture of actual men and wo- 
men, in grand presentation of sublime human trage- 
dies, in beauty and in power of expression, in every- 
thing that constitutes the finest and noblest qualities 
of what we call literature, the Bible is the supreme 
masterpiece of all the ages, surpassing even Shake- 
speare, which comes next to it. After you leave 
school I presume, as a matter of course, that you will 
continue to study the Bible as religion, but I want to 
ask you to study it also as literature. I want you to 
read over and over again the Psalms, Isaiah, Jere- 
miah, Job, and Revelations, because they contain not 
in their entirety but in frequent passages and chap- 
ters, the sublimest poetry that ever burst from the 
human soul. I want you to read the two> books of 
Kings, the two books of Samuel, Ruth, Esther, and 
Daniel, because every one of these great life stories 
is better told and more interesting than the greatest 
novel in the world ; I want you to read the four gos- 
pels over and over again, because they present in a 
manner that is simply perfect the profoundest, and 
most pathetic tragedy that was ever enacted on this 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 91 

earth and tell in language of matchless eloquence 
the most beautiful and deepest-reaching truths that 
ever stirred the human heart or edified the human 
soul. Now, in conclusion on this part of my sub- 
ject, upon which I have already dwelt too long (I 
promise you I will not dwell so long on the other 
parts), let me give you a few hints or suggestions 
as to how to read great books. In the first place, 
read them, as far as practicable, only when your 
mind is in its highest and best moods. In the sec- 
ond place, read them over and over again. In the 
third place, read them by yourselves — read them 
alone. Above all things, don't make the mistake of 
taking your great book and running with it to one 
of these literary societies or clubs with any hope that 
the smart, nicely-dressed ladies and gentlemen as- 
sembled there can in anywise interpret to your soul 
the message that the great book has for you. These 
literary societies and clubs which are so extremely 
popular in our day are most commendable institu- 
tions. Far be it from me to say a disparaging word 
about them, because I believe in them sincerely and 
strongly; but after all, they are only splendid de- 
vices for cultivating the shallows of the human in- 
tellect, and in that they are doing a great work, for, 
as I have said, the shallows must be educated as well 
as the deeps. But no literary society or club or co- 
terie in this world ever has or ever can help the hu- 
man soul into the real understanding or the real en- 
joyment of any truly great book. Take your Brown- 
ing to the literary club if you wish to, but not your 
Carlyle, not your Shakespeare, not your Bible ! Read 
your great book as you say your prayers — in your 
closet with the door shut. In solitude only can your 
soul truly respond to that still, small voice in which 
deep calls unto deep. 



92 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

In the second place, young ladies, in the persons 
that you meet, in the acquaintances that you form, 
in the friends that you make, you will get from some 
1 — and they will be the large majority — shallow call- 
ing unto shallow ; you will get from others, and they 
will be the few rare and choice spirits — deep calling 
unto deep. Sir Richard Steele, the brilliant English 
essayist, once said about Lady Flora Temple, "To 
know Lady Flora is a liberal education." That is 
considered one of the finest compliments that was 
ever paid to any human being, but now I want to tell 
you about a compliment that I once heard that was 
much greater and finer than that. In my youth I 
once read a private personal letter written to an old 
man by one of the most distinguished statesmen that 
the South has produced in these latter years, a na- 
tive Georgian but the adopted son of another State. 
The letter was written at a time when this statesman 
was passing through the stormiest and most trying 
period of his long public career, under circumstances 
that were putting him to a crucial test. In the letter 
he said to the old man : "During the whole of this 
terrible ordeal my soul has turned towards you. You 
are the Gamaliel at whose feet I learned the noblest 
lessons of my life. The impression that your char- 
acter, the purest and loftiest that I have ever known, 
made upon me in my young manhood has been to 
me in every trying hour a great inspiration, and more 
than anything else has helped me through all the 
temptations and corruptions of political life to pre- 
serve mine integrity and to keep my soul erect. Par- 
don me, my dear sir, for this plain speaking, but my 
heart knows to whom it owes its debt of deepest 
gratitude and loves to* acknowledge it." Now, my 
dear young friends, to know a person like that is 
better than a liberal education. One of the most 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 93 

fortunate things that can happen to a boy or a girl 
or a young man or a young woman is to be brought 
into close and intimate relations with a good and 
lofty spirit like that whose influence will be to them 
all through life, as it was to that distinguished 
statesman, deep calling unto deep. It is often said 
that young people are very fine judges of human 
character, and I suppose in a certain sense that may 
be true, but in another sense it is very far from being 
true. Young people, and especially fine-grained, im- 
pressionable young people, are very apt to' pay too 
great hero worship to persons who are merely bright 
and clever and charming in manner and conversa- 
tion, and who possess what is called personal mag- 
netism but who are lacking in integrity and sincerity 
and nobility of character. Young people of natu- 
rally noble instincts and impulses often suffer irre- 
parable and lasting harm from falling under the 
influence of a person like that. Robert Burns, the 
great Scotch poet and a most noble-natured man, 
suffered a lifelong damage to his moral habits and 
had his instinctively fine ideals of conduct debased 
and degraded just because when he was a youth he 
happened to be thrown for six months into intimate 
friendship with a person like that — that is, of bril- 
liant intellect, charming manners, personal magnet- 
ism, but of low character. 

Young ladies, several months ago I read a 
very interesting description of a famous picture 
painted by some celebrated artist. It was called 
"The Heart of the Andes," and it represented 
a landscape scene in the midst of the great 
Andes mountains in South America. In the back- 
ground of the picture was a lofty mountain-peak 
covered with eternal snows and lit up by the golden 
beams of the setting sun. In the foreground were 
trees and beautiful tropical flowers and birds of gor- 



94 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

geous plumage and crags and cliffs and lights and 
shades and mountain streams and foaming cataracts 
wildly leaping. Thousands of people came to see 
that picture, and all were deeply impressed not only 
with its beauty but with its grandeur and nobility; 
and as they stood in front of it many were the enthu- 
siastic comments on those beautiful features in the 
foreground ; the trees, the beautiful tropical flowers, 
the birds of gorgeous plumage, the crags and the 
cliffs, the lights and shades, the mountain streams, 
the foaming cataract wildly leaping, all came in for 
their share of enthusiastic admiration, but scarcely 
one person in a hundred seemed to notice that moun- 
tain-peak snow-covered and sunlit in the background ; 
but now you just step to that picture and with your 
hand or some larger screen cover up and conceal 
from view that mountain-peak, and lo, what a 
change! From the picture the grandeur and the 
glory have departed! And even to the casual ob- 
server all of those pretty details in the foreground 
had lost much of their charm and soon became 
wearisome and unsatisfying. My young friends, 
what the background is to the picture, character is 
to men and women. There are men and women who 
are like a picture with beautiful, elaborately wrought 
details in the foreground, but with only a mean, in- 
significant, ignoble background. I have in my life 
known men and women who were intellectual, highly 
cultured, bright, smart, clever, charming, fascinat- 
ing, and yet who, with it all, were but shallow calling 
unto shallow, because you felt that behind all their 
brilliant parts and splendid accomplishments there 
was no great earnestness, no true sincerity, no depth 
of conviction, no> sublime faith, no loftiness of soul ; 
and on the other hand, I have known men and wo- 
men whose simplest words and simplest acts were 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 95 

enhanced in beauty and in power because you knew 
that they were projected on a background of a great 
and noble character — shallow calls unto shallow, 
deep calls unto deep! Youth is the time to put in 
the background of the picture. It is the morning 
sky that gets the crimson blush. I believe if lofty 
conceptions of duty, pure and noble sentiments, high 
ideals of life, are not fixed in the mind and incorpor- 
ated into the character long before the age of thirty, 
they can never be acquired ; and that is why I want 
you now in the days of your youth to read and as- 
similate at least three or four of the very few su- 
premely great books, and why I wish that you may 
be brought into close association with strong and 
noble men and women, because I believe that such 
influences as these will have a mighty power towards 
bringing out and developing what is best and high- 
est in your own natures, so that, when in your ma- 
turer years your life stands out as a picture painted, 
those who look upon it may see beyond the beautiful 
skills or accomplishments in the foreground, the 
lofty mountain-peak snow-covered and sunlit stand- 
ing in the background, deep calling unto deep. 

In the third place, young ladies, in the events of 
your own life you will find shallows and you will 
find deeps ; that is to say, in your life you will have 
shallow-calling experiences, and you will have deep- 
calling experiences. Those events of your life which 
concern chiefly your pleasures and enjoyments, which 
administer chiefly to your appetites and tastes, which 
gratify chiefly your personal pride, ambition and 
vanity, which promote chiefly your self-interest and 
your self-aggrandizement, may appear to you just 
the most important events in your life, they so appear 
to most people; but such events are only shallow 
calling unto shallow. They appeal to no great 



96 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

depths in your nature, they summon into action no 
noble or heroic power with which the Almighty has 
endowed you. A dance, a ball, a party, the theatre, 
the opera, a new dress, a devoted admirer, a summer 
at one of these fashionable resorts, a trip to' Europe, 
a literary distinction, a social triumph, such things as 
these naturally seem to a young woman important 
events in her life and I would wish that a moderate 
measure of such events might come into the life of 
every woman; but when a woman's soul hungers 
and thirsts after events like these and after nothing 
higher and nobler, when her existence, her thinking 
existence, her feeling existence, her active existence, 
is absorbed and consumed by events like these, when 
her ideal of a happy life is that it shall be crowded 
with experiences like these, then she is in a sad con- 
dition. Then she has become a thoroughly worldly- 
minded woman; and a wordly-minded woman or a 
worldly-minded man is a pitiful creature. I should 
say that a thoroughly worldly-minded person is one 
who responds with eager alacrity to the shallow calls 
of human life but who turns a deaf ear and a stony 
heart to its deep calls. My young friends, there are 
thousands of people who have gained what is gen- 
erally considered success in life; that is, have attained 
wealth, influence, power, social distinction, political 
promotion and so on, by virtue of being thoroughly 
and entirely worldly-minded ; but God pity the man 
or the woman who has gained that kind of success. 
At what a cost it has been purchased! At the cost 
always of a dwarfed and stunted soul; and even in 
a temporal sense "what profiteth it a man if he gain 
the whole world and lose his own soul," or, what 
amounts to the same thing, gets his own soul dwarf- 
ed and stunted. People are constantly seeking for 
and striving after the shallow-calling experiences 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 97 

:and events of human life; but the deep-calling events 
are not to be sought after. They come of them- 
selves, and into every human life they are sure to 
•come. They come generally, not always but most 
frequently, in some disagreeable or repulsive or 
hateful form ; in the form of a bitter disappointment, 
a great adversity, a humiliating defeat, a discourag- 
ing failure, a serious error or mistake unwarily com- 
mitted, a terrible grief, a profound sorrow — heart- 
breaking sorrow, we call it, but if properly responded 
to, heart-purifying, spirit-ennobling sorrow it gen- 
erally proves. I once heard this story told about a 
young woman : She was beautiful and brilliant and 
accomplished, and was universally recognized as the 
leader of the fashionable life in the large city in 
which she lived, and at every brilliant social gather- 
ing she was the bright, particular star, the cynosure 
of all eyes. Her utterly frivolous and wordly life 
was rapidly causing a serious estrangement between 
her husband and herself. One night she had ar- 
ranged to go to a specially distinguished and splendid 
social function, as they call it, but after she had 
dressed and was about to' start her little three-year- 
old girl, a beautiful and charming child, to whom she 
was very deeply devoted, lying asleep in its bed, 
showed symptoms of an attack of croup, and her 
husband tried to dissuade her from going, uttered a 
mild protest against her going and leaving the child 
— a mild protest, because he had learned from sad 
experience not to oppose her strongly in anything — 
but making some plausible excuse for herself she 
sent for the doctor and before he arrived she left 
the sick child with the nurse and went to the ball. 
About one o'clock that night when the festivities 
were at their height and she as usual was surrounded 
with an admiring crowd, there came to her from that 

7at> 



98 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

home of hers a message that made all the color fly 
from her cheeks and caused a look of terror to drive 
the sparkle and the laughter from her eyes. She 
hurried down stairs as quickly as possible, got into 
her carriage and was driven rapidly home, getting 
there just in time to clasp that baby girl to her 
bosom and to see the unrecognizing glaze come over 
its eyes and to feel its last breath on her own cold, 
pallid cheek, and then with one wild scream of agony 
she fell upon the floor in all her ballroom finery in a 
dead faint. When she recovered from that stupor 
she was a completely changed woman. In the twink- 
ling of an eye she had been converted from a butter- 
fly of fashion into one of the noblest, most earnest- 
minded, most consecrated of women. That awful 
event had been to her indeed deep calling unto deep. 
Parents are prone tO' wish for their sons that they 
may have a life of uninterrupted prosperity and for 
their daughters that their pathway from the cradle 
to the grave may be flower-strewn; but I do not 
know that it is a wise wish. God pity the man that 
has never had an adversity, God pity the woman 
that has never had a sorrow. It is from experiences, 
like these that the human spirit gets its finest and 
noblest education ; it is in events like these that deep 
calls unto deep. 

In the fourth place and lastly, young ladies, in the 
work that you will do there will be shallows and 
there will be deeps. In considering this proposition, 
let us confine ourselves to a single illustration or to 
a single kind of work. Most of you expect to enter 
very soon upon the work of teaching, and as a mat- 
ter of fact all of you, whether you expect it or not, 
will almost certainly become teachers. Women are 
the heaven-ordained teachers of the human race; 
that is her great specialty ; that is the high calling to 
which God and Nature have appointed her. 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 99 

The ideal teacher must have two principal qualifi- 
cations. In the first place, she must have the technical 
or shallow-calling qualification. In the second place, 
she must have the spiritual or deep-calling qualifica- 
tion. This normal school or college, which you 
have been attending several years, has provided you 
in a large measure with the teacher's technical quali- 
fication; that is, it has given you scholarship in the 
principal branches of education; it has given you 
knowledge of pedagogy, psychology, methods of 
instruction, and so on. You will find these things, 
these technicalities of the profession, to be of inesti- 
mable value to you in the work of teaching. But 
from a far higher source than any normal school in 
this world must come that deep call that will give 
you the teacher's spiritual qualification — the earnest 
mind, the loving heart, the consecrated soul. One 
of the greatest teachers that ever lived in this 
world, that teacher whom men call Divine, but 
for our present purpose let us leave His di- 
vinity entirely out of consideration, let us forget 
the miracles that he is said to have performed, let 
us put aside for our present purpose the religion 
that he established, and let us regard him as a purely 
human man doing only those things that it is entirely 
possible for a purely human man to do, and let us 
judge his teaching work by the rigid criterion of 
our science of pedagogy — even regarding him in 
this purely human aspect, I say still that one of the 
greatest teachers that ever lived in this world 
was he who taught two thousand years ago in 
the far East in a little country called Pales- 
tine, by the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. 
He never went to a normal school, he never studied 
psychology or pedagogy, he never attended a teach- 
ers' institute, he never read an educational journal, 

LotC. 



100 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

and yet he taught the multitudes that thronged 
around him in temples, in synagogues, in city streets, 
among the mountains, by the seashore, on the green, 
grassy plains, he taught them, I say, with a power 
that has never been equaled in the whole history of 
educational institutions; he taught them in parables 
and in living object-lessons, which for beauty, di- 
rectness and aptness are absolutely matchless in the 
whole range of your fine art of pedagogy. 

Now, if you analyze the secret of that great 
teacher's power you will find that it consists of three 
things : First, in his vivid conception of the truths 
that he had to teach ; second, in his entire consecra- 
tion of purpose to teach that truth ; third, in his sin- 
cere, deep love and sympathy for the human hearts 
and human lives around him. And, my dear young 
friends, after all is said and done, from like sources 
must come your real power as a teacher — from your 
clear, vivid conception of the truths that you have 
to teach, your perfect consecration of purpose to 
teach that truth, and your deep, sincere love for the 
young human souls that gather around you to re- 
ceive that teaching. Without these great fundament- 
al underlying qualities of mind, and heart and spirit, 
all that normal schools and pedagogy and psychology 
can do i for you will avail you little. Those of you 
who have read George Eliot's great novel, "Adam 
Bede," doubtless remember that beautiful character 
Dinah, Dinah the poor, pious woman preacher; and 
you probably remember how at the great revival 
meetings that were going on in her neighborhood 
she astonished and thrilled the people with her beau- 
tiful and powerful prayers, and you remember how 
the highly cultured and gifted young parson went 
to her one day and said : "Dinah, where did you 
learn to pray so well? With all my education and 
years of experience I can not pray such beautiful 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 101 

and powerful prayers as you do. How did you learn 
to pray so, Dinah?" "Nay, master," she said, "I 
did not learn to pray; I love the great God and I 
love his people, and when I kneel among them at our 
meetings the prayers just come, but I know not 
how they come. Nay, master, I did not learn to 
pray." And so, my young friends, if you have any 
of the born teacher in you, the very best thing that 
you will ever do in the schoolroom will not be the 
things that you have learned to do from this normal 
school or that you can learn to do from pedagogy or 
psychology, but they will be the things that will just 
come to' you in rare and luminous moments of your 
life when the spirit most informs you, when deep 
calls unto deep, just as the parables came to the 
blessed Jesus, just as the beautiful prayers came to 
the lips of poor, pious Dinah. After all is said and 
done, after normal schools, pedagogy, psychology, 
teachers' institutes and educational journals have 
done their best, your real power as a teacher must 
come from an earnest mind and loving heart and 
consecrated spirit; shallow calls unto shallow and 
deep calls unto deep! 

From the classic halls and quiet academic groves 
of this Georgia Normal and Industrial College you 
are about to pass out into the world, carrying with 
you the official testimonial of the good and faithful 
work that you have done in this institution; but 
deeper than that, and I hope to you far more precious 
than that, you will carry with you the sincere, warm 
affection of the president and of every teacher in 
this institution. You will carry with you the deep, 
abiding love and the earnest blessing of your Alma 
Mater. Out of reach of her immediate presence you 
are about to pass, but may her voice, her tender, 
loving voice, still always be heard by you, "deep 
calling unto deep!" 



"pi Still Small l/oiee. 



YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class : I 
shall take a certain sublime passage from the 
Bible as a sort of text for what I have to say 
to you this morning. The passage is found in the 
Old Testament, in the nineteenth chapter of the first 
Book of Kings. That chapter tells how the prophet 
Elijah, broken by calamities, bowed down with sor- 
row and despair, withdrew from his people and 
went far out into the forest, where, falling up- 
on his knees, he prayed in agony of spirit to 
Almighty God to send death to him. But death 
came not. Then wandering further on he hid 
himself in a cave and prayed to God to' come 
and speak to him, and God did come and did 
speak to him inspiring words that revived his 
spirits, rekindled his courage, and reformed and 
transformed his life! The sublime passage that de- 
scribes the manner in which God came and the man- 
ner in which God spake to Elijah those inspiring 
words shall be the text of my discourse to you this 
morning. Here is that passage, listen to it: "And 
behold the Lord passed by, and a mighty and great 
wind rent the mountains and brake in pieces the 
rocks before the Lord ; but the Lord was not in the 
wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the 
Lord was not in the earthquake ; and after the earth- 
quake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and 
after the fire a still small voice! and when Elijah 
heard that, he wrapped his face in his mantle and 
went out and stood in the entering of the cave" — to 
hear the words of the Lord. Then that "still small 

(102) 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 103 

•-voice" spake to Elijah those inspiring words that 
revived his spirits, rekindled his courage, and re- 
formed and transformed his life! 

Young ladies, the experience of Elijah has been 
the experience of well-nigh all good men, of well- 
nigh all strong, brave, noble men that have ever 
lived in this world. The words that have most 
helped to make them good, to make them brave and 
strong and noble, have come to them in a "still small 
voice!" In woman's "still small voice," in woman's 
voice soft and low! — oh, my dear young friends, 
that is the greatest moral power in this world of 
ours ! 

Young ladies, several years ago there came down 
to the State of Georgia from certain Northern States, 
from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Pennsyl- 
vania, Ohio, New York, and so on, a company of 
very smart, very intellectual, very earnest women. 
They came down to the State of Georgia on a mis- 
sion. They came down to the State of Georgia to 
say to the women of Georgia : "O Georgia women, 
through all the years you have been deeply and 
grossly wronged ! Through all the years the men 
of your State have allowed you to speak only in a 
'still small voice!' But we have come to tell you 
that you have a right to speak in far other voices 
than that. You have a right to howl in the great 
and mighty wind of political strife; you have a right 
to roar and shriek and screech in the earthquake of 
social revolutions; you have a right to lick out a 
tongue of fire from the pulpit, from the rostrum, 
from the court-house, from legislative halls, from the 
politician's stump ! O women of Georgia, you owe it 
to yourselves, you owe it to your sex, to assert and 
practice these rights ! You owe it to your sex not to 
ihumiliate yourselves any longer by speaking only 



104 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

in the 'still small voice!' ' Those good women (for 
I believe they were good women) — those good wo- 
men, with their heads full of that perverted idea, 
were most courteously received by the people of 
Georgia. They were allowed to say their say and 
speak their speech from the rostrum of the largest 
hall in the city of Atlanta, and hundreds and thou- 
sands of Georgia women went to hear them say their 
say and speak their speech; they listened to them 
politely, they hearkened to them attentively, they 
even applauded their eloquence ! But no sooner had 
those good missionaries gone back to their home in 
the North than the perverted doctrine that they had 
preached "passed like a summer's cloud" from the 
minds of Georgia women, and from the universal 
heart of Georgia's womanhood went out the re- 
sponse: "That doctrine that you have preached may 
be a good thing for your people and your State, but 
not for Georgia, not for Georgia!" s 

Oh, may Georgia women never forget that great 
unchangeable truth : that woman's true power lies, 
and must ever lie, in the "still small voice!" It is 
not the voice of weakness; it is not the voice of 
meekness; it is not the voice of humility; it is not 
the voice of abjection; it is not the voice of sub- 
jection. Nay, it is just the most commanding and 
authoritative voice that speaks in all this world, that 
"still small voice" of woman, woman's voice soft 
and low! There is no other influence on earth to- 
which all that is best in man's nature responds so 
freely and so gladly as to the "still small voice" of 
woman, woman's voice soft and low. But, of course, 
in order to be thus powerfully effective for good 
that voice must be the expression of all that is best 
in womanhood. It must be the expression of a na- 
ture that is pure and chaste and modest and refined ;:; 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 105 

it must be the expression of a disposition that is ten- 
der and affectionate and loving and devoted ; it must 
be the expression of a being that instinctively speaks 
more from the heart than from the brain, more from 
intuition than from logic, more from impulse than 
from reasoning, more from faith than from under- 
standing; it must be the expression of a character- 
that, though gentle, is firm and true and earnest and 
forceful, and last, but not least, it must speak with 
intelligence, it must speak from a well-informed 
mind and an educated intellect. That is the ideal of 
womanhood. That is the womanhood to which 
every knee bows and to which all hearts respond t 
The more nearly any woman approaches to' that ideal 
the greater her power for good in this world. 

An educated womanhood ! that is the requisite 
of the ideal that I would specially emphasize: the 
intelligent, the well-informed mind, the educated 
intellect, that is absolutely necessary to give full 
force and inspiring power to the "still small voice!" 
A woman educated, put her where you please, pos- 
sesses immeasurably greater power for good than 
the same woman uneducated can possibly have. It 
is, therefore, of prime importance for a country 
to have an educated womanhood. People in speak- 
ing to me about this institution frequently say: 
"What a great work your school is doing, fitting 
so many Georgia girls to make their own living." 
Well, that is true, and it is a very gratifying truth, 
but I don't like for that reason for the being of this 
school to be too strongly or too exclusively urged. 
In the first place, I don't like to think that so many 
Georgia girls will have to make their own living. 
I hope none of you will have yours to make, not for 
very long, anyhow. In the second place, I don't. 



106 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

like for this school to be considered as an institu- 
tion for turning out mere wage-earners, mere bread- 
winners, mere workwomen, however expert and 
highly skillful. It does that, it is true, and thank 
God that it does; far be it from me to disparage 
or undervalue that grand function of this school; 
but surely it does much more than that for the hun- 
dreds of Georgia girls who come here every year. 
Surely it improves the tone and quality and adds 
to the authority and inspiring power of that "still 
small voice" which must call Elijahs from their 
caves all over the State of Georgia to speak to them 
words that will help to make them good and strong 
and brave and noble. That is the highest reason 
for the being of this school. 

A liberally educated womanhood is just as im- 
portant to a country as a liberally educated manhood 
is. From the University of Georgia there will go 
out in a few days a class of young men graduates. 
It is to be presumed that these young men, or many 
of them at least, will take an active, leading part 
in the public affairs of the country. They will vote, 
they will attend political conventions, they will make 
campaign speeches and party harangues, they will 
go to the Legislature, perhaps to Congress, they will 
fill local, State and national offices of high and low 
degree, they will be the lawmakers and the law 
administrators of the country; and one of the prin- 
cipal reasons for giving them that liberal education 
at the University is to fit them for the performance 
of those high and responsible duties. But, young 
ladies, there lie before you duties just as high and 
responsible, nay, higher and more responsible, and 
that require for their efficient performance an edu- 
cation just as liberal and of even a finer texture! 
In the home, as daughter, sister, wife, mother, it 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 107 

will be for you, in that "still small voice," to speak, 
line upon line and precept upon precept, words more 
potent for good than any public speech that any man 
can make, though he have the power to sway as- 
sembled thousands or listening senates to command ! 
In the schoolroom, as teacher, it will be for you, in 
that "still small voice," to impart to young minds 
and hearts while they are "wax to receive and marble 
to retain" impressions, lessons that will endure while 
life remains. In society, as organizer and law- 
giver, it will be for you, in that "still small voice," 
to sound the keynote of culture to which all voices 
must accord; it will be for you, in that "still small 
voice," to dictate what shall be the standard of con- 
duct and behavior and to make a code of morals 
more binding than any statute ever passed in legis- 
lative halls ! In the church, as worker and wor- 
shiper, in that "still small voice," it will be for you 
to give to 1 religion its highest sanction and, like the 
vestal virgins of old, to keep the fires burning on 
the sacred altars. There is no other influence in the 
world so deep-penetrating, so far-reaching, so all- 
pervasive as woman's "still small voice" in these 
various functions to which God and nature have as- 
signed her! There is not a man that casts a vote, 
that makes a public speech, that goes to the Legisla- 
ture or to Congress or who' fills any public office of 
high or low degree whose character has not been 
formed, whose energies have not been aroused, 
whose views have not been suggested and shaped, 
whose abilities have not been developed in large 
measure by the power of woman's "still small voice" 
in these various fields of her activity. Oh, what a 
perverted idea it is that women have a right to de- 
sert these glorious fields, to abandon these high and 
holy duties to which God and nature have assigned 



108 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

her to rush into politics and public life, to intrude 
where she is not wanted or needed, to stick herself 
unwelcomed into crowds of men, to meddle with 
men's affairs, 'to be a voter, a speech-maker, an office- 
seeker, a demagogue, a lobbyist, to vulgarize herself, 
to make herself cheap and common by public parade 
and newspaper notoriety ! But that is precisely what 
the so-called "new woman" asserts that women have 
a right to do and ought to do. That perverted idea, 
that disease — for it is a disease, just as much as 
smallpox is a disease — hasn't made its appearance 
in Georgia yet, except in a few sporadic cases, and 
I don't believe it ever can spread in Georgia, because 
I believe Georgia women are born immunes to it. 
But if that perverted "woman's rights" doctrine 
ever should take strong hold and become thoroughly 
established here in the South (which God forbid!), 
it will not be a sign of progress and improvement, 
nay, it will be a sure indication that Southern man- 
hood has become weak and degenerate and that 
across the fair frontlets of Southern womanhood 
has been written the sentence, "Thy glory is de- 
parted!" 

I don't believe there is any other country in the 
world in which women are so respected, so beloved, 
so revered, so deferred to in all right ways as in this 
Southland of ours. Every Southern man — that can 
rightly be called a man — carries in his heart of 
hearts, carries in the innermost sanctuary of his soul 
a pure and beautiful ideal of womanhood, and to him 
that ideal is the very holiest of holies. That is why 
Southern men — above all other men — feel such an 
abhorence for that female pervert, the "new woman" 
— because by her sentiments, by her attitude, by her 
speaky, screechy voice she does violence to that beau- 
tiful ideal that dwells in the innermost sanctuaries 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 109 

of his soul. I don't believe there is any other coun- 
try in the world in which women can exercise such a 
mighty influence for good as in this Southland of 
ours. But they must go about it in the right way, in 
the womanly way, in the Southern way. Her power 
must come not in the mighty and great wind, not in 
the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the "still small 
voice!" Whenever she strains that beautiful voice 
beyond its natural compass it loses its charm, it loses 
its persuasive and inspiring power; it becomes re- 
pellant to the ear and ungrateful to the soul, like 
"sweet bells, all jangled, harsh and out of tune." 

I don't believe that any other country in the world 
has so noble, so worshipful a womanhood as that 
which blesses and glorifies this Southland of ours! 
It always has been so. It was so long before our 
Civil War. In those ante-bellum days in Washing- 
ton City during the gay season, when the grandest 
and finest ladies in the land, the wives and daugh- 
ters of Congressmen and high government officials, 
were gathered there from all parts and sections of 
the Union, distinguished and discerning foreigners, 
who were visiting or sojourning in the city and who 
had the entree to the best society, were invariably 
impressed, deeply impressed by the superior beauty, 
the superior charm, the superior grace of manner 
and graciousness of soul of the Southern women, 
and they were particularly struck and captivated by 
their beautiful, musical voices, like chimes of silver 
bells softly ringing! In those ante-bellum days no 
cultured stranger from other sections or from for- 
eign lands ever visited the South and mingled with 
the best of Southern people who was not charmed 
and captivated by the peerless women who adorned 
Southern society and graced and glorified Southern 
homes. During our terrible Civil War, in those try- 



110 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

ing times when the loftiest passions of the human 
heart were aroused and the human soul was called 
upon to exhibit a sublime heroism rarely paralleled 
in the history of the race, in those days of the crucial 
test, more admirable and illustrious than even the 
bravery of the Southern soldiers was the matchless 
spirit of the Southern women ; not since the Spartan 
mother said to her son, "With thy shield or on it !" or 
since the Carthaginian woman strung her warrior's 
bow with hair cut from her own head has there been 
witnessed in the world such devotion to a people's 
cause as that which the womanhood of the South 
gave to our struggling Confederacy. And in those 
dreadful, shameful reconstruction days when the 
iron heel of the conqueror was on the Southern white 
man's neck, when the United States government was 
doing its utmost to perpetrate upon the people of the 
South the greatest crime- ever attempted against the 
civilization of the world, in those dark days of wrong 
and ruin, when Southern character was being tried 
in a fiery furnace, it was a notable fact, much com- 
mented on at the time and that should never be for- 
gotten, that the Southern women bore up under the 
strain much better than the men did; and she had 
more to bear, for in thousands of homes from luxury 
and abounding wealth she was brought down sud- 
denly to abject poverty and menial toil; but her 
heroism never faltered, and in that gloomy period 
her "still small voice" called many a despairing Eli- 
jah from his cave and spoke to him inspiring words 
that revived his spirits and rekindled his courage. 
And during all these latter years of poverty and 
financial depression in the South, what a noble, cheer- 
ful wage-earner and bread-winner she has been, dig- 
nifying labor as it was never dignified before! 
But for Southern women, the future, the irnme- 



BACCAIvAURDATE addresses. HI 

diate future — the future, young ladies, that you are 
about to enter — holds out greater opportunities for 
good and glorious achievement than they ever had 
in the past. The people of the South, the people of 
Georgia especially, realize more thoroughly now than 
ever before the importance of giving to women a 
liberal and a wise education. This is evidenced by 
the fact of the establishment and maintenance of this 
school by the State. It is evidenced by the over- 
whelming patronage given to this college and nearly 
all other female colleges in the State. It is evidenced 
by the fact that if a man can not liberally educate 
both his sons and his daughters, almost invariably 
the daughters get the education ; that is as it should 
be, for, if possible, it is even more important for a 
State to have a liberally educated womanhood than to 
have a liberally educated manhood. A liberally and 
wisely educated womanhood in the home, the school- 
room, in society, in the church, means a vast deal 
for the future good and glory of Georgia ; for these 
institutions are the original sources, the very foun- 
tain-heads from which flow all that is good and 
beautiful and noble in a people's life, and these in- 
stitutions get their tone and character, their vitality 
and inspiration chiefly from woman's "still small 
voice !" 

Young ladies, I suppose you have all read Shake- 
speare's great tragedy, King Lear, and of course you 
remember Cordelia, the heroine of the play. Well,, 
did you ever think what Cordelia stands for in wo- 
manhood ? We do not know that she was beautiful. 
We do not know that she possessed any of those 
winning but superficial graces of mind, or of person, 
or of disposition, or of manner, that are supposed to 
constitute a woman's chief attraction for men. She 
may have possessed all of those attributes in abun- 



112 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

dance, but if so Shakespeare gives us not the least 
hint or suggestion of it. So Cordelia doesn't stand 
for the "charming woman," as that expression is 
commonly used, though charming she may have been. 
But I will tell you what she does stand for; she 
stands as the embodiment of those qualities in wo- 
manhood that call forth from men the only kind of 
love and adoration that is worth a woman's having! 
Doubtless you remember how every man in that play 
that was truly a man loved and adored Cordelia; 
and perhaps you remember what a distinctly noble 
kind of love and adoration it was that she drew from 
those around her. You remember how deeply and 
tenderly her passionate, headstrong old father doted 
on her; and you remember how all the disaster, 
wreck and ruin so powerfully depicted in that great 
tragedy was brought about because that obstinate 
father would not heed the warning of Cordelia's 
"still small voice," as many another disaster, wreck 
and ruin has been caused because obstinate, head- 
strong men have refused to heed woman's "still 
small voice!" And you remember the noble Earl 
of Kent's chivalric devotion to Cordelia; you re- 
member how at the imminent risk of his own life 
and to the certain destruction of his own fortunes 
he uttered that brave, indignant protest in her de- 
fense and would not be silenced though a drawn 
sword was at his breast! You remember how pa- 
thetically even that poor servant, the Fool in the 
play, loved and worshiped Cordelia! You remem- 
ber how joyfully the young King of France took the 
dowerless, outcast Cordelia to his bosom and made 
her queen of himself and of all that he possessed! 
You remember how easily Cordelia, by the magic of 
her "still small voice," induced her royal husband to 
lead his mighty armies from France into England to 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 113 

-.the rescue of her old father, who had so deeply 
wronged her. And surely if you have ever read it 
you can never forget that touching scene when the 
father and daughter meet after their tragic separa- 
tion; and when shortly afterwards disaster came 
upon them, you remember that plaintive speech of 
poor old Lear's as they were on their way to prison 
together, the tenderest words that ever came from a 
father's lips, the most beautiful tribute ever paid to 
the power of a woman's love ! And you remember 
the closing scene of that awful tragedy, when King 
Lear, with a breaking heart, bending over the dead 
body of his daughter, calls to her, cries to her : 

"O, Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little !" 
And then, thinking that he hears her speak : 

"Ha! what is't thou sayest? 
Sh! Her voice was ever soft, gentle 

And low, an excellent thing in woman!" 

From the bottom of my heart I echo that cry of 
King Lear's: O Cordelia, Cordelia, grand type of 
womanhood, stay — not a little, but stay forever to 
bless and glorify my native State of Georgia ! With 
thy strong, noble, beautiful character, before which 
•every knee bows and to which all souls respond! 
with thy golden heart that "reverbs no hollowness," 
with thy brave spirit that defies adversity, with thy 
sweet voice, "ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent 
thing in woman," O Cordelia, stay forever! 

Let not any new woman with her speaky, screechy 
voice ever displace thee in the grand old State of 
Georgia! 

And now, young ladies, in conclusion, let me say 

8ab 



114 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

that no college president ever felt for the pupils 
under his charge a greater, tenderer love than that 
which goes out from my heart for each and every- 
one of you. No college president ever bade farewell 
to a graduating class with a more earnest hope, with 
a firmer faith than I feel that each and every one of 
you will be good and true and noble to the glory of 
the grand old State of Georgia and to the honor of 
your Alma Mater. Whatever way Almighty God 
wills that you shall tread in your journey across this 
world, from eternity onward towards eternity,, 
whether it be short or whether it be long, through 
whatever regions, through whatever experiences it 
may pass, be assured that along that way in many 
a cave Elijahs are waiting for you, waiting for the 
inspiring power of your "still small voice" to help to 
make them good and strong and brave and noble ! 



"$u/eet Ipflaepces of tl?<? pieiades." 



YOUNG Ladies of the Graduating Class: 
During the latter days of April and the first 
days of the month of May every evening just 
at dusk, if you had looked over in the west, low down 
in the skies in the golden after-glow of the setting 
sun, you might have seen two constellations, or 
groups of stars; you might have seen them as side 
by side they sank softly below the horizon with the 
closing day. Famous beyond all other star-groups 
in the heavens are those two constellations. From 
of old myth and fable, story and tradition have ren- 
dered them dear to the human heart; from of old 
earth's greatest poets have glorified them in their 
noblest songs. Four thousand years ago one of the 
greatest poets that ever lived, in one of the sublimest 
rhapsodies that ever burst from the human soul, said 
of those two constellations, "Canst thou bind the 
sweet influences of the Pleiades ! Canst thou loosen 
the bands of Orion !" 

Orion and the Pleiades, Orion and the Seven 
Stars, as they are more commonly called — who with 
upturned eyes and loving heart hath not watched 
them as from east to west in their annual and diurnal 
journey they moved majestically across the heavens, 
the observed of all star-gazing observers ! Orion 
and the Pleiades, Orion and the Seven Stars, with 
what beautiful fables did the old Eastern astrono- 
mers personify these two constellations: represent- 
ing Orion as a mighty and princely warrior with a 
helmet on his head, a sword by his side, a lion's skin. 

(115) 



116 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

over his shoulder, and in his strong right hand a club 
drawn back to strike the dreadful beast that was 
charging down upon him — the whole story told in 
an outline of most brilliant shining stars ; and rep- 
resenting the Pleiades as a group of sisters, a group 
of beautiful sisters, each with her own soft musical 
name, all bound together in ties of affection and 
journeying forevermore through the heavens on a 
mission of love, on a mission of tender, self-abnegat- 
ing love, and singing meantime songs of joy and 
songs of sadness, "sweet influences of the Pleiades !" 
It is wonderful, the attractive power of that little 
cluster of stars that we call the Pleiades or seven 
stars ! So modest, so soft-shining up there in the 
heavens, "like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver 
braid !" Most inconspicuous, least brilliant, and yet 
most observed, most noticed, best known, best be- 
loved of all star-groups in the heavens are the mod- 
est, soft-shining Pleiades! Take a little child forth 
on a clear, starlit night, and the first group that he 
will notice will be the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, or, 
once point them out to him and they will be ever 
afterwards impressed on his memory and dear to his 
heart. There is scarcely a man or woman, scarcely 
a boy or girl, who does not know the Pleiades, or 
seven stars. All the world knows and loves the mod- 
est soft-shining Pleiades! Ages ago, before the 
mariner's compass was invented, that little cluster 
of stars was the rude sailor's principal guide over 
unknown waters and through the trackless seas. 
There is not a savage in the wildwoods, there is not 
a negro on a Southern plantation who does not know 
and love the Seven Stars, and who does not use them 
as his timepiece in the night and as his guide through 
tangled swamps and trackless forests. Your astron- 
omy teaches you, as you doubtless remember, young 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 117 

ladies, that the sun in his annual journey through 
the circle of the zodiac reaches that little star-cluster 
or, as astronomers express it, is projected into that 
little star-cluster of the Pleiades about the middle of 
the month of May, the season par excellence of flow- 
ers and of the earth's greatest beauty, and in olden 
times people believed that it was "the sweet influ- 
ences of the Pleiades" that gave to the sun at this 
time his genial power and through him to our earth 
her gorgeous robes of glorious flowers and her aro- 
matic breath ; and even at this day astronomers be- 
lieve that Alcyone, the principal one of the Pleiades, 
is the center of the whole stellar universe, and that 
around that little modest-shining cluster all the stars 
of God with all their trains of attendant planets do 
circle forevermore to the sublime, eternal music of 
the spheres ! 

How aptly then did that grand old poet of the 
Bible use the happy phrase "sweet influences of the 
Pleiades." And, my dear young friends, I wish to 
call your attention this morning to the deep moral 
significance of that little sentence. I wish to show 
you this morning that "the sweet influences of the 
Pleiades" is a metaphor of human experience, an 
allegory of human life. I wish in this my last talk 
to you to impress upon your young minds and hearts 
the great perennial truth that the most powerful, the 
deepest penetrating, the farthest-reaching influences 
in this world, the influences that most affect human 
character, human conduct, human happiness, human 
life, come from quiet, unobtrusive sources, come 
from modest, inconspicuous people. I wish as my 
last word to you to say from the deepest conviction 
of my soul that woman, tender, modest, inconspicu- 
ous woman, carries in the folds of her mantle the 
destinies of the nations ! 



118 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

Young ladies, I do not wish to talk to you this 
morning as school-teachers, or as stenographers or 
dressmakers or bookkeepers, nor in any way as pros- 
pective wage-earners or bread-winners. Not that I 
disparage those honorable occupations, not that I 
fail to exalt as they should be exalted the glorious 
women who by their own precious labor make their 
own livelihood 1 — God forbid ! But still I do not wish 
to talk to you from that standpoint this morning. I 
wish to speak this morning straight to the essential 
womanhood that lies back of all that and deeper than 
all that. Neither do I wish to talk to you as new 
women, nor as progressive women; because as to 
the new woman I think she is a rank fraud and hum- 
bug, and I hope you will never become such, and as 
to the progressive woman, why of course I believe 
very strongly and earnestly in the progressive wo- 
man, and I hope you will become such. Still I do 
not wish to talk about the progressive woman this 
morning, because in this intensely self-conceited age 
there is so much talk and boasting about progress 
that it makes me tired, and I do wish sometimes that 
this glorious nineteenth century, or twentieth as it 
is now, would go ahead progressing without so much 
everlasting bragging about it. I don't think it is in 
good taste for any century, however great, to be for- 
ever talking about itself and bragging on itself. 

And, young ladies, speaking of progress, let me 
right here give you a thought which I hope you will 
take and which I hope you will carry away with you. 
It is this : In this world of ours there is somewhat 
that is progressive and there is somewhat that is not 
progressive, and the somewhat that is not progres- 
sive is more important than the somewhat that is 
progressive. Human civilization is progressive, but 
there is no progress of the human species. Hun- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 119 

fidreds of years ago there were in this world of ours 
no railroads nor telegraphs nor telephones nor steam- 
engines nor cotton-mills nor ice-factories nor sewing- 
machines nor typewriting-machines; hundreds of 
years ago little or nothing was known about natural 
.science and the countless comforts and blessings that 
knowledge of natural science has brought to us; 
hundreds of years ago it had not been discovered 
that man came from frog-spawn through a monkey, 
and that the human soul is nothing but lumps of 
grey matter in the brain; hundreds of years ago 
there were no newspapers or kindergartens or normal 
schools or industrial schools; these and such 
Jike things belong to the somewhat that is progres- 
sive ! But, oh, my dear young friends, hundreds of 
years ago there were in this world of ours kind 
•hearts, noble minds and lofty souls ! Hundreds, nay 
thousands of years ago, as far back as history goes, 
there lived upon this earth of ours men and women 
-who in all the essential qualities, attributes, and vir- 
tues of manhood and of womanhood were as true, 
as great, as noble and as lofty as any who breathe 
the breath of life, in this glorious twentieth century. 
There has been a mighty progress of human civili- 
sation. Let us thank the Almighty for it, and may 
-God speed its still further progress, but there has 
been no progress of the human species. If we would 
preserve in perfect purity and integrity what is most 
worthy, what is best, truest and highest in man's 
nature we should take our models from the past just 
as our. modern sculptors study the clear-cut, match- 
less statues of the ancient Greeks. If I were called 
-upon to point out the finest conceptions of noble wo- 
manhood that have ever been bodied forth in the lit- 
erature of the world I should not take them from 
any recent or very modern book ; I should take them 



120 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

from certain old books; I should select them from* 
what I believe to be, taking all things into consider- 
ation, the three greatest books that have ever been 
written. I should take them from Homer, from the 
Bible, and from Shakespeare. 

Let us for a moment consider the women of Ho- 
mer. Three thousand years ago that wonderful book 
which we call Homer was produced. The truly great 
and noble men and women who compose the prin- 
cipal characters of that wonderful book were not 
amenable to those progressive and constantly im- 
proving social regulations and social conditions that 
make the conventional law and the conventional 
life of our day, and therefore they are not to 
be judged by the conventional standards of the 
present time, but in all the fundamental and 
essential qualities, powers and virtues of true 
manhood and womanhood those Homeric people 
never have been surpassed and never will be sur- 
passed. Bloodthirsty as roaring lions, ferocious as : 
Bengal tigers, those Homeric men gloried in that 
dreadful war in which they were engaged, but it was 
not an unjust war. It was waged for the honor of a 
woman and to avenge an outrage perpetrated upon 
the sanctity of a home; and it was fought between 
equals, Greek and Trojan, each finding in the other 
a foeman worthy of his steel ! It was not waged by 
a powerful nation against a people a hundred times 
weaker than themselves in sheer bullying and im- 
position like two wars now being waged on this earth 
of ours in this glorious twentieth century by two 1 of 
the foremost and most enlightened nations in the 
world ! Then where is your progress of the species ?'" 
But even more admirable than the men, are the wo- 
men of Homer. They exhibit a fine self-respect and 
a commanding dignity of character which I am sorry 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 121 

to say, not many women even in our day seem to 
possess, and from those ferocious warriors by whom, 
they were surrounded they drew the highest regard, 
the tenderest affection and the profoundest deference,, 
the wives invariably sharing not only the heart but 
the thought of their husbands, for it never seemed 
to occur to Homer that in sense and judgment wo- 
man is "the weaker vessel." In true manliness, in 
delicacy and refinement, the attitude of the Homeric 
men towards the Homeric women has never been 
surpassed by anything in modern chivalry. And 
surely no women who 1 ever lived were more worthy 
of chivalric devotion than those superb Homeric wo- 
men ! In the literature of the world there is no con- 
ception of a maiden more perfect in grace, tender- 
ness, than the charming Nausicaa! Imagination 
never bodied forth a finer illustration of the queenly 
matron than Penelope ! But best of all is Androm- 
ache, that matchless model of "perfect wifehood 
and true womanhood." In no novel or romance or 
poem or drama that I have ever read is there a scene 
more touchingly true than the parting between An- 
dromache and Hector when he starts for the wars,, 
closing with the incident where he takes the babe 
into his strong arms and after caressing it, returns 
it to the mother: 

"So speaking, to the arms of his dear spouse 
He gave the boy ; she on her fragrant breast 
Received him, weeping as she smiled. The chief 
Beheld, and, moved with tender love, smoothed 
Her forehead gently with his hand, and said" — 

So throughout all the blood and thunder of that 
sublime tragedy the "sweet influences of the Plei- 
ades" are deeply felt, above the clash of arms and: 



122 baccalaureate addresses. 

the trumpets' dreadful blare their songs of joy and 
,songs of sadness are clearly heard, and their tender, 
self-abnegating love give to the splendid epic a beauty 
not so conspicuous, but just as glorious as the stars 
that blaze forth in its great Orion constellation! 
Such, whether in times of war or in times of peace, 
whether in ancient times or modern times — such 
must ever be the right relations between man's mis- 
sion and woman's mission in this world of ours. 
You can not "bind the sweet influences of the Plei- 
ades" nor "loosen the bands of Orion !" 

But older than Homer and more wonderful than 
Homer is that book of books, the Bible, the Hebrew 
Bible, our Bible ! Entirely aside from its sacredness, 
leaving altogether out of consideration for our pres- 
ent purpose its religious character and regarding it 
from a strictly worldly standpoint and judging it 
precisely as you would judge any other book, solely 
for its literary value, even from this point of view 
the Bible is still one of the greatest books that has 
-ever been written. The poets of the Bible, such as 
David, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, possessed an elevation 
of thought and a depth of feeling and a grandeur 
of utterance that never has been surpassed, and that 
no writer of our time, that no writer or speaker in 
this glorious twentieth century, can even remotely 
approach. But. more significant for our present pur- 
pose than these sublime rhapsodies are the histories 
and the narratives of the Bible, or as we commonly 
-call them, the stories of the Bible. Oh, the beauty 
and grandeur, oh, the height and depth and the sur- 
passing tenderness of those old Bible stories ! How 
truly and vividly do they present to us the everlast- 
ing and unchanging verities of human nature and 
human life! Side by side with monsters of wicked- 
ness and depravity they show us in clear-cut outline 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 123 

men and women who in native dignity and nobility 
of character and in all the finer sensibilities of man's 
nature may stand as models for mankind as long as 
the human race endures. For these thousands of 
years man has not added one cubit to his moral stat- 
ure nor a single musical note to the rythmic beating 
of his heart. There has been a mighty progress of 
human civilization, but there has been no progress 
of the human species ! In those old Bible stories you 
may find women at whose feet the finest and most 
progressive and most cultured lady of this glorious 
twentieth century may sit and learn lessons in true 
and heroic womanhood. Some of them are really 
great women, of commanding dignity of character, 
occupying high positions, and exercising a powerful 
public influence, but we will pass these great ones 
by and we will take for our example a woman who 
was one of the lowliest of her sex, a working-wo- 
man, a wage-earner, a bread-winner in the humblest 
of occupations — 'Ruth the Moabitess, who gleaned 
behind the reapers in the fields of young Boaz four 
thousand years ago ! Far and away the most beau- 
tiful idyl ever written in human language is that old 
Bible story of Ruth. How melodious it is with the 
sad, sweet music of humanity ! How eloquent it is 
with noble and impassioned speech! How full it is 
of the milk of human kindness! The distant back- 
ground of calamity and suffering against which the 
whole story is projected; the beautiful devotion of 
Ruth and Noami for each other; their pathetic jour- 
ney from the land of Moab to Bethlehem — Judah; 
the astonished greeting they received from the peo- 
ple there; the touching eloquence of Naomi's reply 
to that greeting; the warm-hearted salutation that 
passed between the rich young Boaz and the laborers 
in his wheat-fields, genial as the summer skies above 



124 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

them, sweet as the breath of the new-mown fields 
around them ; his treatment of that poor friendless 
young woman who gleaned behind the reapers, in 
delicacy, in tenderness, in line-grained manliness ab- 
solutely matchless in all your tales of modern chiv- 
alry; the courtship, the marriage, the birth of the 
babe, and the closing scene where with "one touch 
of nature that makes the whole world kin," old 
Naomi holds out her arms and "took the child and 
laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it" — 
make altogether the most wholesomely touching 
story of genuine human kind-heartedness that I have 
ever read. And the central figure, the heroine, the 
inspirer of this exquisite drama of real life was a 
simple peasant woman toiling in the fields with a 
simple peasant people four thousand years ago! 
Then where is your progress of the species? Even 
to this day the greatest orators of earth, when they 
wish to give forceful and eloquent expression to one 
of the noblest sentiments that can animate the human 
heart, go back four thousand years and take the glow- 
ing words from the lips of that simple peasant wo- 
man : "Intreat me not to leave thee or to cease from 
following after thee ; for whither thou goest I will go, 
and where thou lodgest I will lodge ; thy people shall 
be my people, and thy God my God ; where thou diest 
I will die and there will I be buried; the Lord do so 
to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and 
me." Oh, noble Ruth! Oh, loyal-hearted Ruth, 
stand forever as a model of true womanhood for all 
the women of all the ages of the world — "sweet in- 
fluences of the Pleiades!" 

Now let us come to Shakespeare. By the unani- 
mous agreement of the whole reading and thinking 
world the very greatest book that has ever been 
evolved from the human brain is that book which we 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 125 

call Shakespeare. All women should love Shake- 
speare, because beyond, far beyond, all other writers 
he has glorified woman. Not by flattery nor exag- 
eration nor idealization nor the glamor of romance, 
but by revealing with perfect truthfulness her in- 
effable charms and graces of manner, thought, 
and speech, her goodness, her sweetness, her hero- 
ism, her boundless capacity for tender, self-abnegat- 
ing love. The feminine, the true and essential femi- 
nine, the eternal feminine appears at its very best in 
Shakespeare's heroines. Take his Juliet, for in- 
stance ; Juliet, that queen rose of Shakespeare's rose- 
bud garden of girls! Romeo's Juliet, but beloved 
not only of Romeo but by all the other people, men 
and women, in that wonderful play, and by all who 
have ever read the sad, sweet tragedy of her life! 
She is the youngest of all of Shakespeare's heroines, 
and perhaps the most beautiful. We know that she 
was beautiful because Romeo tells us 

"Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night 
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear!" 

and with becoming rapture he raves about the glory 
of her starlit eyes and 

"The white wonder of my Juliet's hand !" 

and even when he beholds her lying in the tomb 
wrapped in her burial robes, he exclaims : 

"O my love, my wife ! 
Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath 
Hath had no power to mar thy beauty : 
Thou art not conquered; Beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheek 
And death's pale flag is not advanced there I" 



126 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

And not only Romeo, but many other more im- 
partial witnesses bear testimony to her surpassing 
beauty; I could quote a dozen different passages 
from almost as many different persons in the play to 
this effect. Yet it is not for her beauty that we love 
Juliet, but for her warm heart, her tender sympathy, 
her perfect sincerity, her unsophisticated frankness, 
her self-possession through all the tempest and whirl- 
wind that wrought her young soul, her womanly 
heroism in all the tragic situations of her life, and 
over all and above all for her own boundless capacity 
for love as expressed by her own lips in that noble 
passage : 

"My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 
My love as deep ; the more I give you 
The more I have — for both are infinite !" 

Portia, Miranda, Rosalind, Helena, Isabella, Per- 
dita, Constance, Queen Catherine, Hermione, Im- 
ogen, Desdemona, Cordelia, are Shakespeare's other 
great heroines. Not one of them is a conventional 
tragedy queen, but every one of them has a far deep- 
er meaning than any tragedy queen that ever shrieked 
upon the mimic stage. 

As individuals they differ totally from one an- 
other, but each one of them is, in her way, the living 
embodiment of true and noble womanhood. All to- 
gether they illustrate the whole wide range of admir- 
able and lovable womanly qualities and virtues. We 
have among them the gentle and submissive woman, 
the high-spirited and self-assertive woman; the 
timid, shrinking woman; the courageous, daring 
woman; the light and playful woman; the intel- 
lectual and serious woman; the crushed woman; 
the defiant woman — but still, in every instance, the 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 127 

womanly woman, the true woman — modest, pure, 
warm-hearted, sympathetic, heroic, and with a 
boundless capacity for tender, self-abnegating loveT 

Young ladies, these qualities, attributes and vir- 
tues so splendidly illustrated in the women of Ho- 
mer, the women of the Bible, and the women of 
Shakespeare, are the qualities, attributes and virtues 
which must forevermore constitute the strength and 
glory of womanhood. The new woman can add 
nothing to them, the emancipated woman can not 
free herself from their obligations, the progressive 
woman can not go beyond them. My dear young 
friends, the Almighty has endowed each and every 
one of you with a rich abundance of these qualities, 
attributes and virtues. Oh, cherish them as you 
would the apple of your eye ! Strive to develop them 
to the utmost limit of their highest possibilities I 
Through thoughfulness and through prayer seek to 
exercise them for the betterment of mankind and to* 
the glory of the ever-living God! High and sacred 
is the mission whereunto you are called. The world 
looks for you to be the inspirers of noble deeds, the 
preservers of lofty sentiment, the guardians of all 
the sanctities of human life. 

The profoundest and most stirring eloquence ever 
heard in this world are your songs of joy and songs 
of sadness. Upon your ministrations of tender, self- 
abnegating love the salvation of the human race de- 
pends. 

Around the holy of holies over which you preside 
all mortal interests with all their trains of attendant 
joys do circle forevermore to the deep warm throb- 
bings of the human heart ! It is not for you to blaze 
forth in that great Orion constellation, but if you are 
faithless to your mission of the Pleiades, Orion's 
stars will lose their luster, his sword will rust in its- 



128 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

sheath, from his manly shoulders the mantle of lion's 
skin will fall and a calf-skin take its place; from his 
nerveless hand the club will drop and that ramping 
beast will have his way with the civilization of the 
glorious twentieth century! 

In parting with you this morning I wish for you 
precisely what I shall wish for my own precious little 
daughters when they come to where you now are, 

"Standing with reluctant feet 
Where the brook and river meet!" 

I do not expect or wish that you shall seek or gain 
any of that glaring public notoriety which the vulgar 
world calls fame ; but I do wish, I do expect, and I 
do believe that wherever your lot may be cast, there 
will be just the most precious thing, just the great- 
est blessing that the Almighty ever gives this world 
■ — a good, true, warm-hearted, modest woman, exer- 
cising with thoughful intelligence those qualities, at- 
tributes and virtues which from old have constituted 
the glory of womanhood and which forevermore 
must be "the sweet influences of the Pleiades!" 



"T^y Gentleness j-iati? (T)ade /T\e Great." 



YOUNG Ladies oe the Graduating Ceass: 
Several months ago I read in some magazine 
an article which contained a list of the most 
distinguished alumni of certain leading male colleges 
in America — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University 
of Virginia, and others — each institution setting 
forth with boastful pride those of its graduates that 
had attained to great distinction in the political and 
professional life of the country; each claiming so 
many governors of States, so many United States 
senators, so many Supreme Court judges, so many 
renowned lawyers, brilliant preachers, celebrated 
statesmen, and so on. Well, for a male college such 
pride, such boastfulness, such ambition is very nat- 
ural; for from the very nature and organization of 
human society much of the work that men are called 
upon to do, and for which, as a rule, only men are 
fitted to do, when splendidly done necessarily brings 
the doer into great public notice and incidentally 
gets for him what the world calls fame. But to a 
woman's college such pride, such boastfulness, such 
ambition does not appertain, for from the very na- 
ture and organization of human society woman's 
work, however splendidly done, does not bring her 
into public notice, does not get for her what the 
world calls fame; but woman's work is none the less 
important, none the less appreciated, none the less 
glorious for all that, and to fit her for her work re- 
quires an education none the less thorough and pains- 
taking, none the less high and fine, nay rather the 

9 ba (129) 



130 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

higher and finer ! In the centennial catalogue of the 
University of Georgia, issued a year or two ago,, 
there was published a list of all the graduates of that 
great institution during the entire hundred years of 
its existence, and among them were many whose- 
names had filled the trump of fame and who by their 
deeds and achievements had rendered Georgia illus- 
trious. My dear young friends, it is not to' be ex- 
pected that your names, your precious names, will 
fill the trump of fame, but it is to be expected that 
each and every one of you will by your deeds and 
achievements help to render Georgia illustrious ! 

There are two things that are very commonly said 
about women that I detest, because I believe them 
both to be utterly untrue. One is that woman is "the 
weaker vessel," and the other is that woman is "the 
lesser man." Except in a physical sense woman is 
not the weaker vessel, and in no sense whatever is 
she the lesser man. She is neither the lesser man nor" 
the equal man, nor, as some women seem to think 
these days, the superior man. She is not man at all, 
but woman ! Every nerve in her body is finer spun 
than man's, every instinct of her nature is purer than 
man's, every impulse of her heart is more unselfish 
than man's, every aspiration of her spirit is nobler 
than man's. Altogether she is a more finely organ- 
ized, a more exquisite, a more precious creature than 
man, and to this superior and peculiar fineness she 
owes and must ever owe her power in this world. 

From one of the psalms of David that I read to 
you at our opening morning exercises a few weeks 
ago there leaped forth this beautiful and significant 
sentence : "Thy gentleness hath made me great !" 
How suggestive of woman's power, of her power 
over individuals, her power over communities, her 
power over nations, her power over the world's civi- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 131 

lization is that little sentence, "Thy gentleness hath 
made me great !" 

Oh, how mighty is the power of gentleness ! The 
mightiest and most powerful man that ever breathed 
the breath of life in this world owed his might and 
his power to his gentleness. Manliest of men was 
he! Bravery, daring, boldness, aggressiveness, 
strength of will, force of character, sternness when 
needs be, severity when necessary, all were his in 
eminent and preeminent degree, and in the course of 
his stormy and deeply tragic life he had need to ex- 
ercise all these sterner virtues, but they only served 
as a background to emphasize and reenforce his gen- 
tleness. With perfect will he turned his back upon 
the supreme temptation, with perfect bravery he 
drove the money-changers from the temple of the 
living God, with perfect daring he faced furious 
mobs, with perfect boldness he lashed with a tongue 
of flame men in high positions, scribes and Phari- 
sees, hypocrites; but these acts and such like acts 
were only incidental to his real mission of gentle 
words and gentle deeds ! The very flower and fruit- 
age of his life was gentleness ! by the power of his 
gentleness he drew to him, as he journeyed across 
this world, the deepest love and adoration of all sorts 
of people, from the scarlet woman that broke the 
alabaster box of ointment at his feet to the rich man 
of Arimathea, who begged for his dead body to lay 
it in his own new tomb hewn from the solid rock. 
Perennial is the influence of his gentleness. His 
gentle words have more stirred the great depths of 
the human heart than the songs of all the poets, have 
more edified and inspired the human soul than all 
other uttered speech. His gentle deeds have more 
blessed mankind than the achievements of all other 
reformers and heroes, and to-day all the great peo- 



132 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

pies of the world turn to that Man of Galilee with 
the glad acknowledgment, "Thy gentleness hath 
made me great !" Now mark you the quality of that 
gentleness. It was not the weak, flabby, namby- 
pamby kind of gentleness. It came from a nature 
forceful as well as kind, from a heart courageous as 
well as tender, from a spirit brave as well as beau- 
tiful. It came from an insight deeper than your 
psychology penetrates, from a thoughtfulness finer 
than philosophy teaches, from a culture higher than 
schools and colleges give! 

Young ladies, such gentleness is always a mighty 
power, nay may we not say the very mightiest power 
for good in the world ! In its best and fullest devel- 
opment such gentleness implies the kindly nature, 
the loving heart, the thoughful mind, the forceful 
character, the educated intellect, the trained hand. 
Such gentleness is emphatically, distinctly, and spe- 
cially woman's power. It is the power by which she 
makes happy homes; it is the power by which she 
refines, elevates, adorns and charms society; it is 
the power by which she creates all of the dearest, 
purest and noblest joys of this human life of ours! 
Well then may the world turn to her and say, "Thy 
gentleness hath made me great!" "Hath made me 
great" because such gentleness more than any other 
power on this earth enkindles, inspires, brings out 
what is best and noblest, what is truly greatest in 
man's nature. 

Deep, deep in every true woman's heart the Al- 
mighty has planted the gentle instinct, and with it 
lias given her the noble desire, the most earnest de- 
sire of her nature, to use her power of gentleness to 
fill the world, each her own individual world, with 
sweetness and beauty, with happiness and joy and 
love. To cultivate that instinct, to cherish and grat- 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 133 

ify that desire, to develop to the utmost that power 
should be the paramount aim and purpose, pervad- 
ing and transcending all other aims and purposes, of 
a woman's education, of her education while she is 
yet in the schoolroom and her education through her 
own earnest thoughtfulness, after she has received 
her college diploma and has left the schoolroom. 

It is a sad thing to me to observe how many wo- 
men are neglectful of this mighty power, how many 
women undervalue this power. I would wish that 
every young woman, and especially every young 
Georgia woman, would get by heart, not merely 
commit to memory, but get by heart, those lovely 
lines of one of the older English poets : 

"Ah, wasteful woman she who may 

On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing that man can not choose but pay, 

How hath she cheapened Paradise, 
How given for naught her priceless gift, 

How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine 
Which spent with due respective thrift 

Had made brutes men and men divine!" 

Young ladies, if after you have graduated from 
this college you strive not after still further and 
higher and yet higher graduation in the crucial 
school of experience and in the noble school of your 
own earnest thoughtfulness, you will have missed 
the chief benefit that this college and all other schools 
that you have attended meant to confer upon you — 
you have "spoiled the bread and spilled the wine." 
If as soon as you enter society you allow the fine 
enthusiasms that have been enkindled in your young 
souls to be extinguished by the world's frivolities 
and trivialities, if as soon as you come in contact 



134 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

with the harsh, discouraging, belittling actualities 
of real life you abandon your lofty faith and allow 
your beautiful ideals to fade away from the horizon 
of your being as the crimson blush fades from the 
morning sky, then you will have thrown away the 
most precious gift with which the Almighty has en- 
dowed you — you have "spoiled the bread and spilled 
the wine." If as you journey across this world, 
"from eternity onward towards eternity," you grow 
not more and more in charm of manner, in refine- 
ment of thought, in beauty of speech, in decision of 
character, in earnestness and singleness of purpose, 
in depth of feeling, in breadth and magnanimity of 
mind, in warmth and sympathy of heart, so that 
wherever you may be placed, by whatever circum- 
stances and environment encompassed, there shall 
exhale from your very presence an atmosphere of 
womanly gentleness that no mortal being can enter 
without feeling its sweet, ennobling, inspiring influ- 
ence, if you attain not to this, then you have failed 
to develop what is best in you, you will have failed 
to realize the greatest possibilities of your nature — 
you have "spoiled the bread and spilled the wine." 
If when you shall come to that exalted throne that I 
trust awaits each one of you, when on your fair brow 
shall rest the glorious crown of womanhood, when 
at your feet shall kneel the loyal-hearted courtier 
lovingly obedient, joyfully acknowledging your di- 
vine right to rule, and around your knees shall 
gather as adoring subjects with lovelit eyes, chil- 
dren fresh from the hands of God, bone of your 
bone and flesh of your flesh, if in that realm of 
home you reign not so that every stranger and way- 
farer that enters its domain shall pronounce it good 
and beautiful, that to every visitor and honored guest 
its hospitality shall be a golden benediction, that the 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 135 

loyal-hearted courtier and every adoring subject with 
lovelit eyes shall feel that just the dearest thing on 
«arth is a woman's gentleness, and shall realize that 
in the whole universe just the most powerful influ- 
ence for good, for time and for eternity, is a woman's 
gentleness, if when your queendom comes you reign 
not so, then you will have neglected the most pre- 
-cious opportunity ever vouchsafed to human being 
in this world — you have "spoiled the bread and 
spilled the wine." 

Young ladies, quite a number of years ago I heard 
a very distinguished man, a man of national fame, a 
man of great intellect and the highest culture, of 
wide observation and the finest insight say (I quote 
his own language as well as I can remember it after 
this lapse of years), said he: "I have traveled over 
well-nigh the whole civilized world and I have min- 
gled with what is termed the best society in nearly 
all the foremost nations of the earth, and I have ob- 
served with special care and interest the women of 
different countries and different climes, and all preju- 
dice and partiality aside, I assert without doubt or 
reservation that the finest creature in form of wo- 
mankind that the Almighty has yet placed on this 
planet is our own Southern gentlewoman, 

"Heart on her lip and soul within her eyes, 
Soft as her clime and sunny as her skies !" 

He spoke with the utmost sincerity and I believe 
he spoke the absolute truth ; and I believe he might 
.-have gone a step further and said, and the finest 
specimens of this finest creature may be found right 
here in the grand old commonwealth of Georgia! 
I am glad that instead of the conventional word 
""lady" he used that nobler word "gentlewoman" — 



13G BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

a word yet uncorrupted by fashion and undegraded 
by vulgar usage. My young friends, whatever your 
work in life may be, your special work or your gen- 
eral work, we expect of course that you will do it 
well. We expect you to be, according as your fate 
may determine, a good stenographer, a good book- 
keeper, a good dressmaker, a good school-teacher, 
a good business woman, a good housekeeper, or 
what not, but over all, through all, and above all, 
at all times, in all places, under all circumstances,, 
in the completest, noblest, highest sense of the ex- 
pression, we wish you to be a Georgia gentlewoman ! 
So then the commonwealth may indeed turn to you 
and say, "Thy gentleness hath made me great!" 
No State or people or nation can be truly great ex- 
cept through a gentle womanhood. 

My dear young friends, it is God's will that man 
with his creative intellect shall discover nature's 
laws and fill the world with his masterful inventions- 
and works of art ; with his aggressive will shall gov- 
ern the nations; with his strong and valiant arm 
shall "subdue the earth and have dominion over it." 
It is God's will that woman, with her fine, discern- 
ing mind shall decide what is the true, the beautiful 
and the good, and shall say what shall prevail and 
what shall not prevail; with her pure and gentle 
spirit shall guide the human race in paths of right- 
eousness, peace and love; with her exquisite taste 
and deft fingers shall dress the garden of the earth 
and keep it and make it a fit and happy habitation 
for mankind. Who then will say that woman's place 
in the universe is of less dignity and nobility than 
man's? True, it is of less publicity, and it is well" 
that it should be so. Even man with his thick skin 
and tough texture is often spoiled and demoralized 
by publicity ; to woman with her finer moral fiber and' 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 137 

more sensitive spirit it can not but be harmful and 
disastrous. So, my dear young friends, don't be- 
lieve the wild and foolish words that are being too 
much spoken on this subject these days. Don't be- 
lieve that here in your own State your sex is under- 
valued, mistreated, downtrodden, simply because^ 
Georgia men don't want to see Georgia women han- 
kering and seeking after that miserable public noto- 
riety that the vulgar world calls fame and doing all 
sorts of other mannish things. Be assured that the- 
men that love you most deeply and tenderly, that ap- 
preciate you most highly and finely are the very men 
that don't want to see you do these things. 

My dear young friends, Georgia to-day stands in 
need of your power. Georgia is waiting with eager 
expectation to welcome you to the fountain-heads of 
her civilization with your purifying and beautifying 
power — not any new-born public power, but an old 
power, a power as old as the universe, as old as the 
human heart, as old as manhood and womanhood, 
a power as old and mighty in its gentleness as the 
genial sunshine and grateful showers of these sweet 
spring days that have brought the sap up from the 
roots of flowers to fill the world with bloom and 
beauty and fragrance. Your advantage is that this 
innate power of yours has been educated and trained 
for its work in this State school; so the State has 
a right to expect great things of you. Your Alma 
Mater believes that you will not disappoint the State. 

With her warmest love, with her most earnest 
prayers and blessings, and with exulting pride, your 
Alma Mater sends you forth to the heart of Geor- 
gia's civilization, believing that you will use your 
power for the honor and the glory of the common- 
wealth, so that in the coming years her inhabitants, 
her sons and her daughters from the mountains to. 



138 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

the sea, will rise and say, "Thy gentleness hath made 
me great" ; so that in whatever community, in what- 
ever social organization, in whatever household, in 
whatever home your life may fall or your work be 
wrought, all the people thereof will rise and say, 
"Thy gentleness hath made me great" ; so that when 
you shall have finished your mysterious journey 
across this world and shall have passed over to the 
great beyond, your influence will live after you 
through the years and through the ages and genera- 
tions yet unborn will say, "Thy gentleness hath made 
,me great !" 



"^a<?<; /T)emii}isse Olim Juvabit!" 



"OUNG Ladies of the Graduating Ceass: 
In the first book of that superb poem, "Virgil's 
iEneid," you doubtless remember the striking 
scene where ^Eneas at the close of an eventful chap- 
ter in his life and in that of his Trojan companions, 
gathers those companions about him and makes to 
them a noble and inspiring speech, closing his elo- 
quent address with these words : "O socii, haec nobis 
meminisse olim juvabit!" — "O comrades, it will 
be pleasing to us to remember these things here- 
after!" 

That utterance of the Trojan hero suggests a 
truth that dwells in the deepest depths of the human 
spirit, and it seems to me it is a truth that should be 
specially applicable to you this morning. For this 
morning you close a chapter in your life; a chapter 
which by reason of its characteristic events and ex- 
periences, by reason of its own atmosphere and en- 
vironment, by reason of its special loves and affec- 
tions, must forever stand out in clear-cut, bold re- 
lief from all the other chapters in your existence. 
It is the chapter that tells the story of your college 
life. 

That life, with its lights and shadows, its joys and 
sorrows, its bitter and sweet, is now ended. It is a 
tale that is told, a sentence that has been written and 
can be changed nevermore ! 

Your work as students of this college is finished, 
and, for better or for worse, must stand as it is be- 
fore man and God for time and for eternity. My 

(139) 



140 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

dear young friends, as you this morning look back 
on that chapter in your life's story now ended, I 
earnestly trust that the warm young heart of each 
one of you echoes the sentiment of the Trojan hero, 
"O sociij hacc nobis meminisse olim jiwabit!" — 
"O classmates, it will be pleasing to us to remember 
these things hereafter!" 

I once knew an old man who was educated at a 
country school over here in Hancock county, Geor- 
gia, in the early part of the nineteenth century ; and 
it was delightful to hear him talk about his early 
school-days, so full of recollections that were very 
dear to him, so full of simple, sweet, noble memo- 
ries that he had gathered into his heart in the days 
of his youth to be brought forth now to cheer the 
spirit and charm the conversation of his old, old 
age. And I also once knew another old man who- 
was educated at a country school in the State of Mas- 
sachusetts about the same time or somewhat later, 
and he, too, used to talk a great deal about his early 
school-days, but nearly always with bitterness, with 
fault-finding, with sarcasm, with censorious criti- 
cism. I suppose the difference between the two 
might most readily be accounted for by the differ- 
ence in the character of the two schools, but I felt 
sure that it was also owing very largely to the dif- 
ference in the spirit of the two men. For the kind of 
memories that we garner into our hearts as we pass 
through this human life depends as much on the sub- 
jective spirit as on the objective event. Young" 
ladies, I do> hope that in future years when your mind 
shall revert to your college-life in Milledgeville, it 
will be in the spirit of that generous-hearted Geor- 
gian that rejected the bitter and treasured only the 
sweets of his early school-days. 

In behalf of your Alma Mater I ask you, in the 



BACCALAUREATE addresses. 141 

language of the motto- of the Brotherhood of Elks, 
"Let her faults be written in sand, but let her virtues 
be engraven in enduring letters on the tablets of your 
heart !" 

Oh, blessed is the man or woman who as he jour- 
neys through this vale of smiles and tears gathers 
into the garners of his soul an abundant harvest of 
sweet, simple, noble memories ; who, as he turns the 
pages or closes the chapters in his life's story, may 
frequently and truly say, "Haec nobis meminisse 
■olim jwvabitl" 

Young ladies, I believe that one of the best tests 
by which the real culture, the deep culture of any 
person may be judged is by the kind of memories 
that he has treasured up, by the kind of memories 
that are dearest and most sacred to him. Open your 
mind to me and let me see the memory treasures 
that you have stored away in the sanctuaries of your 
soul and in all the secret chambers of your heart, and 
I can tell you the kind of spirit with which you are 
endowed and the kind of culture that you have ac- 
quired. 

As the various and multiform events and expe- 
riences occur in our lives, how little do we know, 
how little do we suspect the rank that each will take 
in memory. It is not until long years after the events 
have occurred that the soul, by some subtle psychic 
law with which the will has naught to do, gives to 
each event its spiritual value. 

It sometimes happens, strange as it may seem, 
that we remember with greatest pleasure, or at least 
with deepest gratification, events and experiences 
which at the time of their occurrence were full of 
pain and suffering for us, as of dangers bravely met, 
difficulties laboriously overcome, adversities nobly 
conquered, hardships heroically borne! Such were 



142 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

the memories of which ^neas speaks in his "Haec 
nobis meminisse olim juvabit!" Such are the 
memories that old soldiers bear of arduous cam- 
paigns and bloody battlefields. And, young ladies, 
probably such will be some of your most gratifying 
memories of your student-life at the Georgia Normal 
and Industrial College. 

Again, it sometimes happens that sad events, the 
great, deep sorrows of our lives, are mellowed by 
time into the sweetest of memories. Emerson says, 
"The room in which the corpse of our best beloved 
hath lain becomes to us on that very account one of 
the sweetest and pleasantest places." Then again, 
and perhaps still more frequently, it happens that 
happy and joyous events and experiences become 
under certain conditions and in certain moods of 
our mind, the mournfulest of memories. How beau- 
tifully is this truth suggested in those exquisite lines 
of Tennyson : 

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes 
In looking on the happy autumn fields, 
And thinking of the days that are no more. 

"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds 
To dying ears when to dying eyes 
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square- 
So sad, so strange, the days that are no' more. 

"Dear as remembered kisses after death, 
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned 
On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
O Death in Life, the days that are no more." 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 143 

And still more touchingly the same idea is sug- 
gested in that sweet psalm of David, "By the rivers- 
of Babylon there we sat down and wept, yea we 
wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our 
harps on the willows in the midst thereof ; for those 
that oppressed us required of us mirth, and they that 
carried us away captives said sing us one of the 
songs of Zion, but how can we sing the Lord's song 
in a strange land?" 

But, young ladies, it seems to me that the most 
significant truth in the psychology of memory is 
this, that our dearest and most precious memories 
and those that exert the most powerful influence 
over our lives are nearly always about simple things, 
of events and experiences that are not far to seek 
but that occur in the ordinary course of any ordinary 
human life, that are the common heritage of all man- 
kind, that spring, as it were, spontaneously from the 
very heart of nature. Wordsworth, in his little 
poem, "Daffodils," gives us a profound hint of this 
truth. Says the poem : 

"I wandered, lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 
When all at once I saw a crowd — 

A host of golden daffodils 
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 

"The waves beside them danced, but they 
Outdid ttje sparkling waves in glee; 
A poet's heart could but be gay 

In such a jocund company; 
I gazed and gazed, but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought. 



144 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 

"For oft when on my couch I lie 

In vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash upon the inward eye 

Which is the bliss of solitude, 
And then my heart with pleasure fills 
And dances with the daffodils." 

And the same thought is suggested in the closing 
lines of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" : 

"Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang 
As if her song could have no ending, 
I saw her singing at her work 
And o'er her sickle bending; — 
I listened motionless and still; 
And as I mounted up the hill, 
The music in my heart I bore 
Long after it was heard no more." 

As from the bosom of mother earth spontaneously 
sprang the daffodils that made so deep and lasting 
an impression on the poet's mind, as from the lips 
of the untutored maiden spontaneously flowed the 
simple song that lingered so long and sweetly in the 
poet's heart, so from the bosom of every-day human 
existence, so from the bosom of every-day human 
loves and affections, spontaneously spring those ex- 
periences in our lives that in long years afterwards 
become our dearest and most precious memories. 

The touch of a hand, the tone of a voice, the ex- 
pression of a countenance, the loving light beaming 
from kindly eyes, the sympathetic word or the in- 
spiring word spoken just at the fitting time, gracious 
actions, unselfish deeds, the loyalty of devoted hearts, 
the simple and sweet amenities of family and social 
life, warm personal friendships, deep personal loves, 



BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES. 145 

some rare and beautiful human spirit with whom 
mayhap it has been our blessed privilege to dwell 
during the formative period of our lives, some great 
and lofty nature that we have known in our youth 
and that stands in our mind in matchless grandeur 
like the Apollo Belvedere among the statues — these 
and the like of these are the elements that go to make 
the sweetness, the beauty, the gladness, the glory, 
the sacredness of this human existence of ours, and 
these are the elements that go to make those expe- 
riences in our lives that in after years become our 
dearest and most precious memories. Such memo- 
ries, dwelling quietly in the human soul, frequently 
exert a powerful influence for good over the dispo- 
sition, character, and conduct of men and of women. 
God pity the man, God pity the woman, whose life is 
not enriched with such memories. God grant, my 
young friends, that your lives may be abundantly so 
enriched, and I do hope that among these precious 
memory treasures, some of the dearest and most pre- 
cious may be those that you have garnered into your 
hearts during your student-life at Milledgeville. 

And so, my dear young friends, I end as I began, 
earnestly trusting that when to-morrow you shall 
bid farewell to your Alma Mater, and fast-moving 
trains shall bear you swiftly away from Milledge- 
ville with its majestic old capitol, its grand old man- 
sion, its modern college buildings, its elm-shaded 
streets, its environing hills, its traditions of the past, 
and its life of the present, the warm young heart of 
each one of you, as you wave your final adieus, may 
echo the sentiment of the Trojan hero, "O socii, 
haec nobis meminisse olim juvabit!" — "O class- 
mates, it will be pleasing to us to remember these 
things hereafter!" 



JUN 



1905 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 746 812 9 



